Distro hopping again: freespire

[Dotan Cohen]

On 15/07/07, Claude Jones <claude_jones at levitjames.com> wrote:
> 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
>

As I intend on using apt-get from the command line, I don't need to
install synaptic. But the Windows Media stuff is one of my biggest
problems in Fedora/*buntu, so I'm rather interested to see how it
works in *spire. On your advice, I'll be sure to check version numbers
before I install packages. I don't mind a tarball here or there.

Dotan Cohen

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