“Linspire reached a deal earlier this year with Mirus Innovations to offer a line of OEM computers with Linux preinstalled, under the brand name Koobox. We’re all in favor of the concept of desktop PCs with Linux preinstalled, but how does the Koobox measure up in practice? The end result is less than stellar.”
If I got this I would just put slackware on it.
Do you think that Mandriva or Ubuntu might have been a better choice than Linspire??
Cheers
Maybe, but I think it really falls back onto support systems and such in the long run. Though I do wonder exactly how many users call support from those companies. Aside from that, I imagine so, except for the plethora of software Mandriva hands you, and Ubuntu’s way to stay slightly more deviated from the “Windows style” of interfaces.
it does sound like the review was largely decent hardware (except for noisy fans), subpar distro. If that’s the case, it might still not be a bad deal (at least you’d know all your components should be supported in so way under linux). I’m curious about linspire as a distro for the home (I spend enough time maintaining our own in house distro where I work.. don’t need to do that at home), but that’s not all that important for me.
still, pity it wasn’t an all around winner, I’d vaguely thought of these myself… LinspireMan, if you’re reading this, how far are you in coming out with your models?
other than that, I’ve been thinking maybe one of the systems off of endpcnoise.com (silence _is_ nice), the opendesktop workstation from genesi, getting a used G4 from my workplace (but running linux on it), or something else… current home system is an old b&w G3 running debian (surprisingly not bad, with debian that is. macos sucks on it). suggestions anyone?
That’s pathetic that DVD playback isn’t working well on their own checked hardware and software.
Sorry Linspire, but learn to be a good distributor before you start charging people. Good distributor’s make good builds; otherwise you might as well just be a source distributor
.
Amazingly thorough and in-depth but overall well-balanced. Shame to hear the results aren’t so great.
Side-note: here’s to hoping it will one day be possible to actually buy any homecomputer or laptop without windows pre-installed in Holland!
I would install OpenBSD and use this box as a gateway.
Your name is Joe User but you would install OpenBSD and build your own Gateway…..something doesn’t fit here.
I used to support Linspire: the idea of a distro that even Granny could use.
But now I am beginning to change my mind: releases are too few and far between (which means that most of my hardware is not supported), you need broadband, too few languages are supported…
With other words, Linspire is right only for a small minority of users. This is due to CNR, which makes updating the distro and the apps very difficult for the developers and makes broadband almost compulsory for the user.
These days if I had to suggest a distro to a newbie I’d rather go for Xandros, SUSE or a LiveCD.
or you could suggest VectorLinux [ http://www.vectorlinux.com]
it would suit this hardware situation well, and give a good performance experience also. Wish some one can try installing the latest Soho 5.1.2 and provide a similarly thorough review.
cheers
ram
as a former wanna-be fanboy of limpspire, i decided windows is infinitely better than this distro.
!!!
It is your Choice, but do not think or try to express that Windows is better than Linspire…
I have several PCs and I’m forced to use Windows in 2 of them, but any Debian or almost any Linux, or BSD distro is better than Windows for a too large number of reasons to expose here…
For instance, people complain about not having DVD capabilities out of the Box in Many Linux distros, not included for Legal reasons.
Well, you do not have decent DVD out of the Box in Windows neither… You have to install WinDVD or Power DVD…
You have to install Nero, and many multimedia codecs, and, Offce and many patches and security, and so on…
You have to install also the propietary drivers for Nvidia and ATI, because those included in Windows XP do not include OpenGL, for instance, what does prevent you for playing plenty of very good and know games…
Summarizing… You have to install almost the whole stuff after the Windows OS installation, and never ending installing and patching…
Windows is much less out of the box than most Linux distros. Windows is actually LESS “Destop ready” than Linux.
What happens is that more people is Windows savy than Linux savy, and they can get through the painfull process of patching and improving the system better. Or if not, they can find people to help them (friends, in the office …) more easyly.
Is this better than any Linux distro… IMHO the answer is NOT, is NOT better at all
So, the more people use Linux, BSD, any other OS, Distros… the quicker and easier they will solve the system problems that any OS have, since nothing is perfect, and everything can be improved…
In an imperfect world, close the “Windows” to the most imperfect systems, and “open” the door to what is open, and more perfect…
Angel–Fr@gzill@
!!!
Sure, you do have to install a third party DVD player when you install Windows, and yes, you have to pay for the privilege. But when you do, it works.
When you configure DVD in Linspire, it doesn’t work. How does that make it better?
Playing a DVD should be bread and butter to Linspire, especially the “multimedia” version. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect it to play a DVD flawlessly.
Edited 2006-03-24 05:58
!!! “Sure, you do have to install a third party DVD player when you install Windows, and yes, you have to pay for the privilege. But when you do, it works.
When you configure DVD in Linspire, it doesn’t work. How does that make it better?
Playing a DVD should be bread and butter to Linspire, especially the “multimedia” version. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect it to play a DVD flawlessly. ”
— I agree with you, it’s notunreasonable to expect it to play a DVD flawlessly.
I do not use this distro so i can not tell, but I can assure you that there are distros and ways to play a DVD flawlessly in Linux.
If DVD in Linspire doesn’t work for you, it may be that you have just to make a small correction, some setting, bug etc.
But this happens also in Windows and PowerDVD, or WinDVD… sometimes I have encountered problems myself to Play DVDs in windows too…
Nothing is perfect, and years of experience have shown me that Windows is in many things less perfect than Linux or BSD…
Angel–Fr@gzill@
!!!
“If I got this I would just put slackware on it.
Do you think that Mandriva or Ubuntu might have been a better choice than Linspire??”
The current Linspire 5 isn’t exactly ‘snappy’, even on my system with an Intel2.8ghz processor and 1GB of RAM.
IMO, SuSe, Xandros, Ubuntu or Mandrake would’ve been better fits for the hardware. These distributions still have to work on easy software (un)installation&upgrades though. Linspire has a very nice tool going with C&R, I just can’t see why Ubuntu/SuSe can’t do anything similar with .deb packages or rpm’s.
One of the best methods for installation still is cramming everything onto the DVD’s/CD’s though, something where SuSe shines. Still, not everything is well. A little story (SuSe 9.3 Pro):
I have my SuSe box all setup, with:
* multimedia codecs (e.g. MP3 and Ogg playback – easy with Yast Online Update) * Mplayer (harder; unsolved dependencies), the latest
* nvidia drivers (installed from the command line with nvidia’s scripts – including kernel-source installation & update – hardest; would have been easiest if not for the kernel-source not being present on my system)
* Windoze core web fonts (something like that) – easy with Yast Online Update
Then I wanted to download a fansub anime yesterday, but I couldn’t in Linux since I spent the entire week trying to get Azureus installed, it missed libpython-gtk or something, and even after I installed it, it crashed.
Result: me grudgingly booting back into Windows to download the thing with BitComet.
But I discovered on Novell’s website that for 10.0, they included Bittorrent and Ktorrent. Which would have saved me ALL that trouble! So smart thinking for 10.0, too bad I don’t have it (waiting for the supposedly more stable 10.1)
Installing Skype, however, was a piece of cake, since they had RPM’s specifically designed for SuSe 9.X
Within three minutes (download + installation), I was online with Skype, with everything functional. Now that’s what I call easy installation (not to mention ‘compatibility’ with Windoze)
Last time I used Linspire or Xandros, they were broken. They break things like KDM, and Konqueror. This makes it difficult to remove the gobs of extra stuff the install that I don’t need. I often find myself installing on 500MHz or slower machines, so I need things to be real easy to shrink and optimize. (No, I don’t want to use Slack or Gentoo… I’m an opponent to compiling software that should work right in the first place)
I was a big debian fan until Ubuntu came along, mostly because all of the RPM distros stink… face it…even with YUM, Yast, or whatever is included with other distros, APT is still tops.
I’ve used Mandr[ake]/[iva], and fedora. I’ve always had trouble finding what I was looking for. On Debian, Synaptic solved this… put it all in one place, all I had to do was add a few lines in the repositories (using the graphical editor in Synaptic).
If there was a website out there that presented the packages in a nice graphical layout (like CNR) and debian based distros associated deb files with dpkg -i, click & run would be put to shame.
Maybe if it was done as a WIKI community project, where people can add applications they use, screenshots, and links to the deb, or a way to automatically download it from the repository.
As far as getting dvd/mp3/etc working….well, I’ve been using Kubuntu, so Automatix can take care of that for me (though I had it all working before I even knew about automatix)
This could be… a pretty good system for like a file and/or services server. First get rid of linspire. Install something like Slackware, Gentoo or CentOS. Any or the good distros will work fine. 512Mb of ram is more than enough. Run it in init3. Servers don’t need gui. The 7200 RPM 160GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 ATA drive is perfect to make this and nfs and samba shares server. You can do anything, FTP, Apache, BIND, you name it. Price is reasonable. NIS or SAMBA/DOMAIN are other nice ideas. Go crazy. If you are a regular joe, use CentOS of Fedora. If more advance, slackware gentoo or the BSDs. This is a pretty good deal in my opinion. Plus, like said before, no windows tax money and you are suupporting Linux in some way.
Do they have an pcie slot available? You could slap on a nice video card and make it a modest gaming system. For $100 more you can get the Performance Koobox with the AMD Athlon 64 3000 processor!
Not bad at all!
Figa
The Koobox is pre-loaded with Linspire 5.0, which is not a distro for experienced Linux users. I am horrified at the concept of a Linux distro that is configured, by default, for the user to run as root.
Damn.. Seems like they want to copy every windows feature.