Thoughts from the abyss

I mentioned briefly in one of my articles months back about Linspire planning a completely free OS release called Freespire. They finally released a beta a few days ago. I’ve been playing around with it the past few days, and I have to say I’m rather impressed, for a user-based non-poweruser release. Installation was a breeze, it’s rather small (only one CD), installed rather fast, and has everything a normal desktop user at home would need to navigate the internet. E-mail client, Firefox, photograph tools, multimedia tools, everything that was supposed to be promised from Linspire.

I think this is going to become popular. It won’t be popular with the admin users, those that don’t like GUIs, but hey, who cares. It it helps people drop Windows and move over to a Linux kernel, then I support that. We’ll see where it goes. I know now when I help convert a ‘Doze user over to Linux I load them up the distro that I use. CentOS is a wonderful distro, but sometimes it’s a pain because it’s geared toward the server/enterprise class. Not something that is meant or fit for a plan desktop user. Although I can always get everything installed and working, multimedia wise, if a release like this can make it easier on a user moving over, then great.

They have an interesting packaging system. You can select packages from a CNR “Click and Run” interface, or run apt-get at the command line to install, update, or remove packages. The graphics and GUI is sharp and clean looking. Like I said, this will not be a release for the admin or network admin. It’s geared completely toward the mom and pop desktop user. From reading the release schedule, it looks like in around a month they’ll have a true release out. Check it out at: Freespire. I’m eager to see how the project progresses the next few months.

If you don’t feel like installing it onto hardware, there’s a VMware image available on the VMware apps website. It’s on the Freespire downloads.