Freespire Linux OS Beta 1 is out

Anonymous · Post by **Anonymous** » Mon Jul 17, 2006 2:37 pm

wall the first beta of the free Linspire name Freespire
is out its dabian base distro run nice on not so strong cpu (800Mh) kde 3.5 openoffice bla bla bla
I'm putting small Gallery of the install and the desktop
and link to download

imag Gallery
http://www.mavor.com/freespire/
download
http://wiki.freespire.org/index.php/Download_Freespire

CptnObvious999 · Post by **CptnObvious999** » Mon Jul 17, 2006 4:52 pm

Looks pretty cool. Guess I will add yet another distro on my list to test

btw I like your computer name

Post by **Patrick** » Mon Jul 17, 2006 4:58 pm

Downloaded and burned. Probably will try it out on my test drive late tonight.

Tsuroerusu · Post by **Tsuroerusu** » Mon Jul 17, 2006 11:00 pm

Hmmmm, non-Free drivers included in a distro out of the box, smells like a GPL violation to me, because this is exactly what Novell got a nice letter in the mail for doing.

mrben · Post by **mrben** » Tue Jul 18, 2006 3:12 am

Tsuroerusu wrote:Hmmmm, non-Free drivers included in a distro out of the box, smells like a GPL violation to me, because this is exactly what Novell got a nice letter in the mail for doing.

Why is it a GPL violation? Boxed distributions have been supplying non-Free software for years out of the box - the old SuSE boxsets had bundles of non-Free stuff.

Tsuroerusu · Post by **Tsuroerusu** » Tue Jul 18, 2006 3:40 am

mrben wrote:
Tsuroerusu wrote:Hmmmm, non-Free drivers included in a distro out of the box, smells like a GPL violation to me, because this is exactly what Novell got a nice letter in the mail for doing.
Why is it a GPL violation? Boxed distributions have been supplying non-Free software for years out of the box - the old SuSE boxsets had bundles of non-Free stuff.

I am aware of this, but if it isn't a GPL violation, then tell me why both Novell and Kororaa received angry letters from kernel developers when they included non-Free drivers?

The GPL doesn't allow linking to non-Free code, and that's what the NVIDIA and ATi driver do, this is also why you can't use Qt for non-Free software without paying Trolltech a license for the commercial version of Qt, GTK is under the LGPL which does allow for linking to non-Free code, so you can use that for proprietary applications.

mrben · Post by **mrben** » Tue Jul 18, 2006 4:08 am

Tsuroerusu wrote:I am aware of this, but if it isn't a GPL violation, then tell me why both Novell and Kororaa received angry letters from kernel developers when they included non-Free drivers?

Ah - herein lies the key - it's about drivers, which are linked into the kernel, rather than codecs, which aren't. Including the drivers could be a GPL violation, because of the linking. But codecs aren't linked in the same way, AFAIK, and even if they were linked, they would only link to a media player, and so it would depend on the license of said player, not the license of the kernel.

FWIW my impression was that Kororaa was more in trouble because it was distributing the nVidia drivers, which is against the license agreement of the drivers themselves, regardless of the linking.

Tsuroerusu · Post by **Tsuroerusu** » Tue Jul 18, 2006 4:16 am

mrben wrote:Ah - herein lies the key - it's about drivers, which are linked into the kernel, rather than codecs, which aren't. Including the drivers could be a GPL violation, because of the linking. But codecs aren't linked in the same way, AFAIK, and even if they were linked, they would only link to a media player, and so it would depend on the license of said player, not the license of the kernel.

If you read my original reply again you'll notice that I say that non-Free drivers sounds like a GPL violation, not non-Free software in general.
And by the way, I have read the GPL from beginning to end so I'm quite familiar with it's licensing terms.

mrben wrote:FWIW my impression was that Kororaa was more in trouble because it was distributing the nVidia drivers, which is against the license agreement of the drivers themselves, regardless of the linking.

Nope, it was GPL issues, NVIDIA explicitly states that you are allowed to re-package their driver as long as the binary-only files are not modified, and that's what Kororaa were doing.

Here's the part of NVIDIA's license I am referring to:

2.1.2 Linux/FreeBSD Exception. Notwithstanding the foregoing terms of Section 2.1.1, SOFTWARE designed exclusively for use on the Linux or FreeBSD operating systems, or other operating systems derived from the source code to these operating systems, may be copied and redistributed, provided that the binary files thereof are not modified in any way (except for unzipping of compressed files).

mrben · Post by **mrben** » Tue Jul 18, 2006 4:49 am

Tsuroerusu wrote:If you read my original reply again you'll notice that I say that non-Free drivers sounds like a GPL violation, not non-Free software in general.

Ah - sorry. Misread. My mistake.

I would be interested to see if they've actually gone ahead and done it, or whether it was a stated aim that was quashed by the licensing issues, and will be replaced with a '1-click install' of some sort.

Either way - I'm more of a GNOME fan, so Freespire doesn't really hold much promise for me, so I'll be sticking to Ubuntu for the time being.

Tsuroerusu · Post by **Tsuroerusu** » Tue Jul 18, 2006 5:00 am

mrben wrote:
Tsuroerusu wrote:If you read my original reply again you'll notice that I say that non-Free drivers sounds like a GPL violation, not non-Free software in general.

mrben wrote:Ah - sorry. Misread. My mistake.
No problem

mrben wrote:I would be interested to see if they've actually gone ahead and done it, or whether it was a stated aim that was quashed by the licensing issues, and will be replaced with a '1-click install' of some sort.
I think they're going ahead with it, should be interesting to see if Linspire gets angry letters in the mail.

mrben wrote:Either way - I'm more of a GNOME fan, so Freespire doesn't really hold much promise for me, so I'll be sticking to Ubuntu for the time being.

http://wiki.freespire.org/index.php/Com ... E_based.3F
"Initially, Freespire will be built around the KDE environment, but again, being a community project, it's certainly conceivable that GNOME variations will emerge over time. However, it's important to know that Freespire believes in using "best of breed" applications in the default distribution, so you will find both GTK and KDE based programs in Freespire, and you can swap applications in and out using CNR or apt-get."

Speaking of GNOME, mrben, as a GNOME user, what do you think of SLED? (If you havn't tried it, what do you think of the looks of it?)

mrben · Post by **mrben** » Tue Jul 18, 2006 5:10 am

Tsuroerusu wrote:Speaking of GNOME, mrben, as a GNOME user, what do you think of SLED? (If you havn't tried it, what do you think of the looks of it?)

I've not tried it - I've looked at a few screenies.

I have mixed feelings - on the one hand I think that Novell are doing a lot of good work, and SuSE was always a good distro. On the other hand, I think that much of the 'goodness' of GNOME is the amount of time they have spent working on usability, and developing their HIG, which Novell have completely thrown out the window. It's possible that some of their changes will make their way upstream into GNOME, but I suspect that it won't happen, which is a shame.

While a bit of rebranding is fine, making major changes just makes it more difficult for people to move between distributions, which is supposedly a strength of Linux.

Tsuroerusu · Post by **Tsuroerusu** » Tue Jul 18, 2006 5:38 am

mrben wrote:
Tsuroerusu wrote:Speaking of GNOME, mrben, as a GNOME user, what do you think of SLED? (If you havn't tried it, what do you think of the looks of it?)
I've not tried it - I've looked at a few screenies.

I have mixed feelings - on the one hand I think that Novell are doing a lot of good work, and SuSE was always a good distro. On the other hand, I think that much of the 'goodness' of GNOME is the amount of time they have spent working on usability, and developing their HIG, which Novell have completely thrown out the window. It's possible that some of their changes will make their way upstream into GNOME, but I suspect that it won't happen, which is a shame.

While a bit of rebranding is fine, making major changes just makes it more difficult for people to move between distributions, which is supposedly a strength of Linux.

I've tried it quite extensively, and the only thing that they really have customized is just the menu, Nautilus and everything else is exactly as in Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian and others. Also, this custom menu is completely open source, so GNOME could absolutely adopt it if they wanted to, it's actually in GNOME's own CVS repository and released under the GPL and some parts are LGPL.

It's quite easy to install on Ubuntu, if you wanna try it, take a look here: http://angelicpenguins.blogspot.com/200 ... buntu.html

no1important · Post by **no1important** » Tue Jul 18, 2006 12:59 pm

I heard about some controversy a while back about some of their drivers and such but have not really been following it to much. I did sign up at their forums and was looking to maybe give it a try but to tell you the truth I am quite happy with Dapper Drake and Arch that I use now.

Post by **Patrick** » Tue Jul 18, 2006 1:19 pm

Got it running on my test drive. My initial thoughts:
- It's going the sudo route for admin tasks
- firefox is up to date 1.5.0.4
- desktop is based on old version of KDE (3.3.2)
- super fast install (20 minutes)
- mp3, flash, qt, java out of the box
- nVidia drivers installed automatically
- Click-n-run is on by default, you have to pay to make it fully functional
- apt-get works by default but has 180 repository entries
- able to install any F/OSS without a problem
- too many of the menu entries have listings for apps currently not installed but 'available' thru Click-n-Run

Overall impression:
Very good for a beta piece of software. Needs a newer version of KDE by default. Nice distro for a noobie or someone who's lazy. Will definitely check it out again when the final version comes out.

Tsuroerusu · Post by **Tsuroerusu** » Tue Jul 18, 2006 1:40 pm

Patrick wrote:Got it running on my test drive. My initial thoughts:
- It's going the sudo route for admin tasks
- firefox is up to date 1.5.0.4
- desktop is based on old version of KDE (3.3.2)
- super fast install (20 minutes)
- mp3, flash, qt, java out of the box
- nVidia drivers installed automatically
- Click-n-run is on by default, you have to pay to make it fully functional
- apt-get works by default but has 180 repository entries
- able to install any F/OSS without a problem
- too many of the menu entries have listings for apps currently not installed but 'available' thru Click-n-Run

Overall impression:
Very good for a beta piece of software. Needs a newer version of KDE by default. Nice distro for a noobie or someone who's lazy. Will definitely check it out again when the final verrsion comes out.

OK, I have to be kind of a miniature fanboy here, what do you think of it compared to SUSE 10.1? And I do already take the stupid package manager into account.

Speaking of that package manager, more patches will be out for it this week, plus a big-ass kernel update that will make SUSE 10.1 and SLED 10 use precisely the same kernel, which will allow use of KMPs for SLED 10 on SUSE 10.1, which will make it very easy to install the ATi and NVIDIA graphics drivers.