Guys, for some time I have been testing Freespire. And Before I did that I even went on to buy Linspire to see how a commercial distro works. That was for sheer curiosity. With Linspire (which earlier was Lindows) was good, but I could feel it to be too Windowish. After using Linspire 4.5 for just a few days (precisely less than a week), I dumped it. But Then came Freespire.

On April 24, 2006, Linspire announced its own project named "Freespire".[4] The new Freespire distribution was announced by then Linspire President and former CEO Kevin Carmony. This follows to the model of Fedora Core being supported by Red Hat and the community since 2003. Novell had also started a similar community project by the name of openSUSE for its SUSE Linux product line in the second half of 2005.

Freespire is a community-involved, Linux-based operating system that combines the best that free, open source software has to offer (community involved, freely distributed, open source code, etc.), but also provides users the choice of including proprietary codecs, drivers and applications as they see fit.

The distribution is a Debian-based, community-driven and -supported project tied to the commercial Linspire distribution. Freespire includes previously proprietary elements from Linspire, such as the Click N' Run (CNR) client, while other elements, which Linspire itself licenses but does not own, like the Windows Media Audio compatibility libraries, remain proprietary/closed source. Consequently, there are two versions of Freespire, one with the proprietary/closed source libraries, and one, called Freespire OSS Edition, that includes only open-source components. Freespire has a number of in-house programs written in Haskell and O'Caml, such as its ISO image builder, its hardware detection and autoconfiguration, its package autobuilder and "Debian library", and also the programs managing the CGI.

Unlike Linspire version 5 and earlier, Freespire does not enable the root account by default. Instead, it gives sudo rights to all members of the admin group. This is due to the fact that it is based on Ubuntu as its base.

Freespirs's strenght also resides in CNR (or more appropriately CNR.com), the Click-N-Run software management service, and it is free.

CNR.com is a free one-click software delivery service designed to standardize the process and eliminate the complexity of finding, installing and managing Linux software for the most popular desktop Linux distributions, both Debian and RPM based.

With CNR.com you get the most extensive free resource available anywhere for desktop Linux software. Search from tens of thousands of Linux software programs, packages and libraries by title, popularity, similar software, category, Who's Who, or function, and with just one click install the software on to your computer. The question that crops up next would be "Which Linux distributions does CNR support?" The answer, as of now:

1. Debian
2. Fedora
3. Freespire 1.0, 2.0
4. Linspire 5.0, 5.1, 6.0
5. OpenSuse
6. Ubuntu 7.04

Freespire should be given a try to make your own opinion. Check it out here:
http://freespire.org

Cheers
-Tarun

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Dr. Tarun Kant
Scientist D
Biotechnology Laboratory
Forest Genetics & Tree Breeding Division
Arid Forest Research Institute
New Pali Road
Jodhpur 342005 India
Phone: +91-291-2729162
Web: http://drtarunkant.port5.com/
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