The last review of this Distro was Lindows 4.5 Laptop Edition [1]. 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 [2] 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.

[2] Five-O recognized all my hardware, even my unsupported AirLink+ Wireless PCMCIA adapter. Linspire is using the “ndiswrapper module [3]”, 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

[3]The Linspire Desktop is nothing but eye candy. It should be, Linspire hired Everaldo Coelho [4]. Everaldo designed the Crystal icon set [5] 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. Linspire Internet Suite

The Internet Suite is based on Mozilla 5.0. At first I was thinking, well, why not just use kmail or even Thunderbird? Why go to all that trouble? Then I remembered all the hoops I jump through to move my kmail to newer versions of KDE. Keven Carmony, CEO of Linspire, told LinuxElectrons, “To make for a better experience for our users, we have over 150 changes in our version of Mozilla that didn't make it into Firefox in time for the Five-0 release”. “Some examples are in-line spell checking, MailMinder, Hot Words search [6], and so on”. “By the time we released Five-0, weighted as a whole for our target market, Mozilla was the better product given all our changes”. Ahhhh, Linspire was thinking ahead.

You can install any of the plugins that are available for Mozilla into the Linspire suite. I had problems with google toolbar though, it would not render correctly. To my dismay I was able to crash the Internet Suite and FireFox on Five-O by simply going to http://www.apple.com/quicktime/ [7]. Two small alternating windows open and close continuously. Going back in the browser or trying to move to a different site causes either browser to crash. This must be a plugin problem since it also happens on FireFox. I was able to play Windows and RealPlayer media files without problems. Linspire is the only Linux distribution that supports Windows Media out of the box that I know of (minus DRM). Click for more information on “Linspire's support of Windows Media [8]” file formats.

“As with all our open source and Mozilla changes, we give those back to the main tree and are working with the Firefox developers to incorporate most of these into the next version of Firefox. Our intention is certainly to move to Firefox and our development has moved in that direction, but for now, Mozilla is the preferred product for our users. Even though Linspire users can install Firefox in seconds with just one click of their mouse using CNR, the majority find the enhancements we've made to Mozilla are simply too compelling, so they stick with Mozilla as their main browser. Many of our users will install Firefox using CNR to play around with it, since there's so much buzz around Firefox, but most end up actually /*using*/ our modified Mozilla browser because they get very addicted to all the changes we've made. That's the beauty of CNR, you can use either or both; we leave that up to the user”, said Keven Carmony, CEO of Linspire.

Lphoto

I fired up Lphoto then plugged in my camera, a Cannon PowerShot A70. Lphoto recognized the camera and I told it to scan the photo's (download from the camera). You can burn your photo's straight to CD from within Lphoto as regular files or as a video CD. Lphoto's simplistic looks fooled me at first. Lphoto is a feature rich, full blown photo management suite. I did run into a problem, I cannot get rid of the “Latest Import” rolls. Dragging to the “Trash” or right click “remove” does not delete the items. Also I had Lphoto crash after running a slideshow with OpenGL. The backtrace says its the radeon_dri.so library. I'm using the default X.org radeon drivers. My personal preference is to use NVIDIA by the way. The laptop I tested with had an ATI chip.

Lsongs

Lsongs has some quirks. The “equalizer” button doesn't work, nor does the “visualizations” option. I also dropped audio in Lsongs and the audio didn't come back with a program restart. At the time Lsongs dropped audio, I was messing with the kmix mixer controls. So I ran frozen-bubble as a quick audio test, and yeap, it worked. My guess is that something happened to jackd because the “Test Audio” in kcontrol wouldn't play either. I did a “quick-restart” and logged back in and tried again, I gained audio back. I'm told that the developers are working on fixing the audio problems and will push out the fixes through CNR. I tuned in some SHOUTcast radio stations to see what was going on. This is actually pretty slick, but the audio quality reminded me of my 1970's transistor radio. This is not a Linspire problem, but a SHOUTcast problem. Power Users

Linspire now offers some support for those who which to compile their own kernels and software. However, locating the developer tools and kernel source is awkward and is nearly impossible by just browsing through CNR. Searching in the forums for “kernel source” I came up with some hits. It wasn't until I used the forums that I found some hints. I'm told that that Developer Edition Five-O is on its way though. If you currently use or have used a Debian based Distro, you will be right at home, because Linspire is a Debian based distribution. I wrote a Linspire kernel compile HowTO [9] to give ya a jump start.

Software Management

[9] Linspire uses a program called Click-N-Run (CNR) to perform software and system management. This program is a pleasure to use. All the software that an average user could think of installing is provided in CNR with ease of use. Software is categorized very nicely in the Warehouse section. CNR also provides OS announcements, news and system updates from within this program. For every program installed, an icon is created on the desktop and also added into the Linspire menu.

Reflection

Linspire is a little pricey. Let me explain. For $50.00 you get the basic set of software features that rival that of Windows. To get the full blown Linux Distribution you have to purchase a subscription to CNR which now puts the price tag up to $90.00. SUSE 9.3 is only $80.00 and comes on DVD/CD. An alternative to CNR subscription is to use the Internet to find packages based on Debian. Another problem with the CNR route is that if you are on dial-up, getting those extra programs will be slow. Do I think Linspire has value? Yes I do. Your paying for that hand-holding. In fact, I've convinced my mom to try Linspire on her kitchen computer, she's tired of the virus's, scams and hack-attacks that goes along with running Windows.

The Linux Desktop has arrived for the average user and its called Linspire 5.0. Linspire's feature set exceeds that of any currently shipping Windows Desktop when combined with CNR. Despite some of the problems I ran into, this is the perfect upgrade for those Win 9X, NT, 2000 machines. I can even recommend Linspire to Power User's now that developer support has been added. It's just really nice to plug things in and have them work.


Legend
Green – up to date. Should not have any issues.
Yellow – some components might be out of date, missing and, or has some minor issues.
Red – components are out of date, missing and, or has major functional issues.

Additonal Information:

Linspire Hardware Compatibility Database [10]

Linspire Community Forums [11]

Basics of the Debian package management system [12]