Fantastic Freespire

I had tried Linspire 6.0 OEM a while ago and was terribly let down. The interface for previous versions of Linspire were always professional and more polished than most of the other distros. However 6.0 looked like very little time was spent on polishing the interface, it was almost an exact clone of Ubuntu. My guess is because Linspire is changing their business strategy, they would rather spend time coding Click and Run than trying to redo their base distro, Ubuntu. I think they are moving from being a Linux distro company to a software provider for Linux because as we all know, one of the major problems with Linux is installing software. I could rant for a while as to I don't understand why the software providers just don't package the program and all of the dependencies like a windows exe, but I won't put you through all of that.

I haven't spent a lot of time playing with Linux lately, but I decided what the heck, why not try it , when I saw the new version of Freespire. I installed it on my old HP ZE1250 laptop that must have some odd proprietary chip set that just does not work with Linux. If you look at my past posts you can see that I have had nothing but problems trying to get Linux to work on this laptop.

I grabbed the ISO and burned it to CD. The install process is very similar to K/Ubuntu. Not as simple as the Linspire installation process, but still easier than Windows. Freespire inherited an aggravating flaw from Ubuntu, by default you have to install grub in the mbr. To get around this with Ubuntu they have an alternative ISO image that will allow you to install grub in the root partition, Freespire does not have an alternative ISO so there are some special steps that you have to take that I cover below. I use Acronis boot manager because I triple boot or quadruple boot, and one distro's version of grub may not boot another version of Linux, and if it doesn't you are stuck trying to edit the grub config file (good luck if you are not a programmer), or you can reload the version of Linux that you use the most, leaving the other version unusable. I learned the hard way, go with an after market boot loader and install grub in the root partition, it will save time in the long run. Anyway, the Freespire/Linspire install is fast and easy. The options are kept to a minimum and the installer just works (for me anyway, even on my Linux hating laptop).

The one thing I really like about Freespire is they keep programs on the CD to a minimum so everything fits on one CD. This is the opposite of Suse, when you install Suse you need five CDs plus the "add on" CD if you want closed source programs, and it will take up two gigs of disk space on your hard disk. If you do an install with KDE and deselect everything but KDE, it is still almost two gigs on your hard drive. I am not a programmer so I don't need five shells and six editors. Suse also includes software that I just don't use, Evolution for example. This sounds like I am bashing Suse, I am not, I really like Suse, I just wish they had a basic installation CD that included KDE and a minimum of other software. I know they have a network installation CD but you are still stuck with almost a two gig install that you end up downloading.

I do tech support for a medical company, and from time to time our customers will have to reload Windows because their computer will not boot. This was a big problem before service pack one was released, it still happens, but just not as often so it appears that SP1 and Sp2 fixed a lot of initial problems.

The usually reason that Windows will not boot is because the hive is corrupted. One solution to repairing the hive is to boot into a shell and manually copy the Windows system files, but if the customer is not good with computers or the english language, it is much easier to reinstall Windows. Installing takes over an hour and one half for Windows alone, then we need to install the printer drivers, reinstall our program and restore the data. From the beginning to end it takes over two hours. There were many times I wished that our program would run in Linspire, if it did I could have the customer put the CD in the CD drive, three clicks and fifteen minutes later we would be done, we could even make a bootable image CD with everything we needed on it and included it with our computer when we ship it.

The other problem that we have encountered with Windows is activation. Our customer's computers are not connected to the internet so we have to hope that after reinstallation the customer calls Microsoft to activate Windows. I know of several times when they did not and I received a phone call thirty days later saying they were locked our of the computer because Windows was not activated.

As stated earlier, if you remove the check mark from "install grub in master boot record" (something like that) Freespire should install grub in the root partition, and actually in older versions of Linspire (Lindows), if you did not install grub in the MBR, it would automatically install grub in the root partition. Alas, those were the good old days!

Since Freespire does not install grub in the root partition on its own, after the install, Acronis will see the new OS, but when you click on the icon to boot it all you get is a flashing cursor in the upper left hand corner of the screen. I searched the Linspire forms and was able to find the solution as explained below, of course this works with Linspire also.

Once the install is complete, boot into live Freespire CD (this works with other live Linux CDs or if you have a working Linux version on your hard drive) and open a terminal as root, then type the following:

grub (press enter)

You will get a grub prompt.

Then type:
root (hdX,Y) Where X is the drive number, you have to remember that grub was most likely written by an engineer so your first hard drive is 0 not 1. If you want to install grub on the second hard drive the syntax would be (hd1,Y), be sure to include the parenthesis. The next variable is the drive partition- Y and again you have to think like an engineer, so if you want to install grub on the fifth partition of the first drive the syntax would be (hd0,4).

Press enter.

Then type:
setup (hdX,Y) then press enter. The syntax will be the same as the root command. I have encountered a problem with grub when typing the the setup command, I will get an error message the first time I type the setup command. If that happens, just retype the command (or press the up arrow key, this will bring up the last command that you typed) and press enter, it has always taken it the second time through.

Close the shell and reboot, once in Acronis, or the boot manager of your choice click on the Freespire icon and you should boot into your system.

Once in Freespire you will get the "first boot" configuration screens where you can configure date and time, set up the network connection, add users and more. Once finished with all of that, you are finally using your Freespire OS.

When I wrote this Click and Run was still in alpha so I was not able to use it to install any other programs.

One thing Ubuntu is really bad at is wireless networking, I have five wireless cards and I think only one of them works in Ubuntu. The Ubuntu wireless applet is lame compared to Freespire's wireless setup. Also, I could not get ndiswrapper to work at all in Ubuntu, I have not had to try to use it in Freespire because my D-Link cards work!

I have an old Microsoft B wireless card that works in just about every version of Linux that I have tried (Microsoft, go figure), I also have a D-Link DWL 650g that usually works in any distro can load the madwifi driver. The D-Link card does not work in Ubuntu, but works flawlessly in Freespire. My laptop is a fair distance away from the router so it is nice to get a little extra speed.

Click and Run is not up yet so I am kind of stuck with the programs that came on the CD. I tried Automatix but was not able to get it to work and I also did not have any luck with klik.atekon.de either.

Final thoughts about Freespire 2.0, the look and feel is not highly polished like most Linspire versions, but then it is the community supported version. I expect the final Linspire 6.0 version to be better than Freespire 2.0 and the Linspire 6.0 OEM version that I had tried a while back. I don't thing Freespire is ugly, it is just that the interface could be a little better, the icons are different than other flavors of Linux but they are kind of basic, there is nothing special about the look of Freespire. That said, Freespire works great, I use to love, after an install, searching for and adding repositories to get non-free software and tweaking everything. I still like getting in and tweaking the interface, but is nice to have all of the codecs installed. It is also nice to have my wireless cards "just work".