On Sun July 15 2007, Dotan Cohen wrote: > As I contantly distro hop between F[C] updates, I've been looking at > Freespire as my next victim. Has anyone any experience with this > distro? I am looking at the full, non-OSS version, as although I do > prefer F[L]OSS software, I will take functionality over idealism for > now. Please, lets not turn this into an idealogy war, I just want some > of the Fedora community's opinions of the Freespire distro (not it's > ideals, but it's merits/bad points). > > Note that my hardware is a Dell Inspirion laptop (1680x1050 screen, > DuoCore 2Ghz, 2GB RAM, Intel wireless, ATI X1400 256MB video, 80 GB > 7200rpm hard drive). I have had problems with the video in FC 5 and 6, > and in [K]Ubuntu 6.10 and 7.04. That's what I get for buying > proprietary hardware, I know, but live and learn. I'm not sure what you seek from the non-free version, but, fyi, most of the non-free stuff is available to the community version, or whatever they call it. Obviously, if you want stuff that is only available for sale such as CrossOverOffice or Win4Lin, you will have to pay for that. I tried Freespire several times. It was a breeze to install, and to operate, and all the usual suspects such as ATI/Nvidia drivers just installed and worked. Their repo is huge, and probably will have anything you seek. What I ran up against, was that once installed, there were never any updates - you were stuck with whatever versions were available at the time of the distro-release; further, I found a lot of the packages I was most interested in such as creative content creation stuff like video editing and such, were stuck a couple of versions back from the ones available at the time of release. Stuff like Windows Media playback also worked with the community release. I remember it being a bit of a sleuthing job to get synaptic installed instead of their CNR package manager, which is the key to getting access to their full repos - it's allowed, but it's not made obvious - but that was my experience as of a year ago. -- Claude Jones Brunswick, MD, USA
