On Thu January 25 2007, Ric Moore wrote: > This sounds almost too good to be true, I think I would trust using a > system like that, with a universal LSB format and plenty of mirrors > maintained by the distros so one outfit doesn't rule the dnloads. I > would not trust just one outfit to be in charge. We might find ourselves > faced with a new breed of "shareware" with popups, gimmie gimmie and all > the old windows crap. If it can be made equitable and everyone is happy, > then I'd be for it. Ye Olde Curmudgeon, Ric Just because they open up their repo's to the public, and make their package selection multi-distro, I don't think the other repos are going to curl up and go fetal, so I doubt it will ever get to the one mega-repo. As far as ads and such, I can't say - I've test run Freespire. I found it a very good distro in many ways, and the package selection was huge - they have a weird way of databasing the thing and when you open Yumex or Smart, you can watch it checking through something like 160+ different repo lists - that's a bit tedious. The other thing I found with Freespire and the package selection they made available was that it was rather far behind the cutting edge, software wise. Everything you install, just installs and works, and comes up with all sorts of pre-configuration taken care of - but, many packages were two or three major revisions back from what you get with Fedora. We'll have to see how that plays out because if they intend to become a Fedora repo, they're going to have to deal with that issue - maybe they're just going to mirror Fedora's existing repo's - who knows? The other thing that's of interest to some and anathema to others, is that they do happen to be the first Linux distro that is legally licensed to distribute packages that will play Windows Media - that was part of their settlement with Windows where they gave up the "Lindows" name in exchange. I believe they are already making those packages available in the free CNR repo. I tried all this back when the first Freespire beta was released - it may be time to try it again since the second beta was released about a month ago. Oh, and I just remembered one other thing that put me off about Freespire - there were never any updates. That could have been because it was early beta - though I do remember reading something about how that was a 'feature' of the paid version of the repo - the free version would only provide security updates within each release cycle, or something like that - I could have all this wrong, and I'm sure they are going through a lot of changes in policy, anyhow. Time to revisit I guess... -- Claude Jones Brunswick, MD, USA
