Linspire 5.0, The Linux Desktop For The Masses

The last review of this Distro was Lindows 4.5 Laptop Edition. I was disappointed. The most important part of a laptop OS should be power management, and it failed miserably on my laptop. Its been over a year now and lots of things have changed in the Linux universe. Lindows is now known as Linspire and their legal squabbles are behind them. Linspire has been hard at work and modernized their feature set as stated below.

Features

• Kernel 2.6.10
• KDE 3.3
• Reiser 4 "unbreakable" File System
• X.org 6.8.2 for improved video support
• Supermount for easier removable media use (CD, Floppy)
• WiFi Support
• Lsongs Music Manager
• Lphoto Photo Manager
• RealPlayer 10
• PhoneGaim Instant Messenger with free long-distance phone calls
• Open Office 1.1.3
• Linspire Internet Suite
• AOL Dialer/Internet Connection Support

For the complete feature list in detail, visit the Linspire website.

Installation

This is one area where Linux distributions are really starting to shine, and Linspire is no exception. I let Linspire “take over the disk”, pressed next, and confirmed that I wanted Linspire to “take over”. The installation started, and I only had to enter the machine name and root password. I didn't have to type anything else until the first boot. The install process was so fast and easy, there's nothing to review or talk about. Wait, yeah there is.

Linspire has chosen to eliminate some of the bloat that ships with most Distro's. Linspire doesn't have kmail, evolution, or even nine audio mixers. Most distributions ship with full versions of Gnome and KDE, plus some, that's a lot of overlap. Keven Carmony, CEO of Linspire, commented, “Linspire is Linspire because we touch pretty much every package in the OS”. “We rarely just take a package and put it in our OS without polishing it up, adding features, fixing bugs, etc”. Don't fret, you can still fire up CNR and download all the applications you want.

Five-O recognized all my hardware, even my unsupported AirLink+ Wireless PCMCIA adapter. Linspire is using the “ndiswrapper module”, however, I didn't have to use any Windows driver disk. Sweet. Hibernate actually works too! You can save lots of time on the boot process if you turn off your machine using the hibernate feature. The “Lock & Hibernate” feature will bring your desktop back locked. Tight!

The first thing you want to do is to add yourself as a “user”. You can still install CNR applications without having to be root or requiring a root password. There is a CNR “group” which all users get added to by default.

The Desktop

The Linspire Desktop is nothing but eye candy. It should be, Linspire hired Everaldo Coelho. Everaldo designed the Crystal icon set for KDE. There are even some SUSE Yast icons in the Linspire set too. Those SUSE icons must have been overlooked during packaging. The Desktop theme is custom from the icons to the window decorations. I really like the window decorations, it has rounded corners which breaks up all the squareness, plus drop shadows. I personally don't like how Linspire emulates the Windows menu structure in kmenu (task bar), I prefer the KDE method. Seeing that Linspire is for users coming from Windows, it makes sense for their target market.

The Distro ships with a “How-To Tutorial” player. The player is very well designed and thought out. Its not full of marketing fluff, up-sell or a push platform for advertisements. It truly contains useful information on Linux and using the Linspire Desktop.