Here's a surprise. Linspire (including Freespire and Click 'N Run) has been sold to Xandros. Some share-holders are less than impressed about this.
Kevin Carmony, ex-CEO of Linspire writes on his blog:
In classic Michael Robertson form, he has once again completely disregarded the 100 some-odd shareholders of Linspire by pulling off this deal without a shareholder meeting.
And follows up with:
Why would Linspire pull off a midnight, back-room sell-off without a shareholders meeting? I'd ask them myself, but they haven't returned emails from me in the last ten months, and since they didn't hold a shareholders meeting in this matter, one is only left to speculate.
Does this mean that Linspire / Freespire / CNR is dead? Maybe. Things haven't been that rosy of late in the Linspire garden. My own dealings with them have been less than fruitful.
I signed up with CNR as a publisher a couple of months ago. Sort of. You see, I received a couple of welcome emails after signing up, but no instructions on how to submit my software onto CNR. Multiple (polite) emails were left unanswered. Pity really as CNR looked like a promising way of providing software to multiple distros.
Regular readers (hello mum!) will remember my positive review of the latest Freespire release, I just hope that Xandros hasn't bought Linspire to bury what was a polished alternative to Ubuntu and a decent distro in its own right.
Showing posts with label Freespire. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Freespire. Show all posts
Tuesday, 1 July 2008
Saturday, 10 May 2008
Random stuff from my week
This has been quite a busy week, both at work and at home. Having to children at home keeps you busy at the best of times, starting to prepare for the new baby (due date October 21 folks!) is keeping us in a permanent state of panic.
Work has been busier than usual. Last week was spent on a fast-track Windows Server 2003 Active Directory Planning, Implementing and Maintaining course (Microsoft 2279B and 2282A). Since I've spent the last year or so battling with our current AD setup most of this was pretty familiar, but it is nice to get an insight into the less well used aspects of AD, and also to see the new features for AD 2003. Now all that remains it to persuade my boss to buy the licenses to upgrade our AD controllers to Windows Server 2003.
This week has been varied at work (to say the least). We had a major crash on our main editorial server (running on Solaris) that took a little while to sort out. The problem looks like it was either caused by the network card or by some corruption in the /devs directory. Either way the outcome was the same - neither of the network cards would start on boot-up. After removing and re-seating the gigabit card I was able to start it manually.
After trying quite a few alternatives (checking the network and so forth) we did a "boot -r" to recreate the device nodes, followed by another reboot which got everything up and running again.
This was followed by spending some time upgrading our backup Editorial server to give it enough disk space to adequately hold a copy of our editorial data. Finding out how to get the extra disks added to the A1000 controller was fun, to say the least. To cut that story short you need to be running Array Manager 6.22.1 to get it to run on Solaris 8. A word of warning - don't be tempted to install an earlier version. I did, and had one hell of a time getting access back to the existing raid arrays.
Luckily for me Sun still provides downloads of Array Manager 6.22.1 as well as some decent documentation on installing and running it.
One problem I did encounter is that once we had installed the new disks, created a new LUN and a raid 5 stipe set (with one disk left over for a hot spare) we couldn't create a file system on the disks. In fact we kept getting the error that the disk geometry was unrecognised.
Running format against the new disk set provided the fix for this - the labels on the newly added disks were incorrect. Once they had been re-labeled by format it was a simple task to create the new file system and migrate over the old data from the old disk to the new one.
To top off the week was my yearly assessment. A couple of hours of being told how wonderful I am by my manager is great. Now about that pay rise. . . . . .
. . . . .
To finish off with I've just got round to upgrading the hard disk on my current test laptop. It has a 15gb drive, but I wanted to use the 40gb one from my previous tester. Swapping the drives is the work of a few minutes. How about re-installing the OS?
The original machine dual booted between Windows XP and FreeSpire, the current one was just using Ubuntu. Booting up the new laptop was great. FreeSpire autodetected all the new hardware, went straight into X, started the onboard wireless and connected to my network. Amount of reconfiguring to do - none. Everything works perfectly and at the higher resolution that the new laptop supports.
Now for Windows XP. The story here is not so good. Windows "Blue Screens" about two seconds into the boot process. It won't go into safe mode either.
I'll have to decide whether XP goes back on when I re-format to put back on Ubuntu.
Work has been busier than usual. Last week was spent on a fast-track Windows Server 2003 Active Directory Planning, Implementing and Maintaining course (Microsoft 2279B and 2282A). Since I've spent the last year or so battling with our current AD setup most of this was pretty familiar, but it is nice to get an insight into the less well used aspects of AD, and also to see the new features for AD 2003. Now all that remains it to persuade my boss to buy the licenses to upgrade our AD controllers to Windows Server 2003.
This week has been varied at work (to say the least). We had a major crash on our main editorial server (running on Solaris) that took a little while to sort out. The problem looks like it was either caused by the network card or by some corruption in the /devs directory. Either way the outcome was the same - neither of the network cards would start on boot-up. After removing and re-seating the gigabit card I was able to start it manually.
After trying quite a few alternatives (checking the network and so forth) we did a "boot -r" to recreate the device nodes, followed by another reboot which got everything up and running again.
This was followed by spending some time upgrading our backup Editorial server to give it enough disk space to adequately hold a copy of our editorial data. Finding out how to get the extra disks added to the A1000 controller was fun, to say the least. To cut that story short you need to be running Array Manager 6.22.1 to get it to run on Solaris 8. A word of warning - don't be tempted to install an earlier version. I did, and had one hell of a time getting access back to the existing raid arrays.
Luckily for me Sun still provides downloads of Array Manager 6.22.1 as well as some decent documentation on installing and running it.
One problem I did encounter is that once we had installed the new disks, created a new LUN and a raid 5 stipe set (with one disk left over for a hot spare) we couldn't create a file system on the disks. In fact we kept getting the error that the disk geometry was unrecognised.
Running format against the new disk set provided the fix for this - the labels on the newly added disks were incorrect. Once they had been re-labeled by format it was a simple task to create the new file system and migrate over the old data from the old disk to the new one.
To top off the week was my yearly assessment. A couple of hours of being told how wonderful I am by my manager is great. Now about that pay rise. . . . . .
. . . . .
To finish off with I've just got round to upgrading the hard disk on my current test laptop. It has a 15gb drive, but I wanted to use the 40gb one from my previous tester. Swapping the drives is the work of a few minutes. How about re-installing the OS?
The original machine dual booted between Windows XP and FreeSpire, the current one was just using Ubuntu. Booting up the new laptop was great. FreeSpire autodetected all the new hardware, went straight into X, started the onboard wireless and connected to my network. Amount of reconfiguring to do - none. Everything works perfectly and at the higher resolution that the new laptop supports.
Now for Windows XP. The story here is not so good. Windows "Blue Screens" about two seconds into the boot process. It won't go into safe mode either.
I'll have to decide whether XP goes back on when I re-format to put back on Ubuntu.
Friday, 4 April 2008
FreeSpire 2.0.8 - First Impressions
Regular readers may remember my quest to find the perfect GNU/Linux for my elderly HP OmniBook XE (40 gb hard drive, 156 meg RAM, running at a cracking 450mhz). I have tried a few different distros with varying levels of success - Green OS being the closest so far.
I've been playing with XP on the beast too - which worked surprisingly well on the limited hardware and memory.
Recently I went back to try a current version of Freespire, which like Green OS is based on Ubuntu. I've had limited success with Ubuntu itself, but strangely enough distros based on it seem to work well.
Freespire is no exception. I'd decided to set the laptop to dual boot between XP and Freespire in case everything went tits up. I'd given Freespire a dry run on an old Dell PC which I'd had lying around.
If you do a default install (and take over the entire disk) then the install is entirely painless, and slightly easier than installing Windows XP.
Setting up a dual boot on FreeSpire through was less straight forward. Choosing an "Advanced" install gave me a list of the current partitions, but no way to resize them. It recommended rebooting and choosing the third option to amend the partitions.
The third option turned out to be the graphical safe mode - nothing to do with resizing the disk. In the end I turned to an old Ubuntu CD and used that to resize the Windows XP partition. Returning to Freespire with 20 gig of free space I tried the advanced install again - even with free space on the drive there was no way of creating partitions.
Bugger.
Back into Ubuntu and I created a large main partition and smaller swap one. Returning to FreeSpire and this time I was able to select my new partition ready for the install. But wait, even though the partition was available and selected there was still no option to continue the install. Yes folks, we have hit the curse of the 800x600 screen resolution.
The "next" button was hidden off the bottom of the screen. Hitting "Tab" a couple of times then pressing "Enter" got me onto the next stage of the install and after that it was plain sailing. Right up to the point where I re-booted.
Grub came up, but no option for my Windows installation.
Aaaaaargh!
Luckily there was an option to redetect and after running that and rebooting again an option for Windows XP did appear.
But enough about the install. Once I had Freespire up and running it actually works rather well. My wireless card was detected and easily runs as well as it does on Windows XP. Connecting to my wireless network was a snap using the provided tools. The onboard sound card runs well, everything feels nice and snappy.
A real bonus is the CNR (Click 'n' Run) service. You don't need to register to run it (although it is free to do so if you wish), and installing additional software is as simple as choosing it from the list and clicking "Install". I've already added "The Gimp" and "Amarok" onto the laptop and I've got to say it was entirely painless.
Another "good thing" is that MP3s work from the outset. Flash is also pre-installed (so YouTube works out of the box). In fact, as far as multimedia goes Freespire is as good as it gets. All the codecs are legally licensed versions and I can safely say that this is a Linux distro that is squarely aimed at giving as good a user experience out of the box as you are likely to find.
Freespire looks good, is nippy enough to install on low-end hardware (P2 class and above) and feels like a modern operating system should.
Overall I've got to say that I've been pleasantly surprised at just how well it works. Yes, the install was a bit quirky (if you want to install alongside Windows that is) but once it is on the whole thing runs really well.
I'm going to stick with it for a while and see if it holds up to prolonged usage. But so far, so good!
Update (11/4/2008)
In the interests of fairness, I'm going to admit something. The install instructions were correct. If you boot into the "Live CD" environment then the partition manager is right there on the desktop.
D'oh!
I've stuck with FreeSpire for a couple of weeks now - and it really does work like a charm. In fact, I'm currently playing with an old Toshiba Satellite 4600, which also works really well with FreeSpire. High resolution graphics, decent performance, the built in wireless card also works out of the box too.
I've been playing with XP on the beast too - which worked surprisingly well on the limited hardware and memory.
Recently I went back to try a current version of Freespire, which like Green OS is based on Ubuntu. I've had limited success with Ubuntu itself, but strangely enough distros based on it seem to work well.
Freespire is no exception. I'd decided to set the laptop to dual boot between XP and Freespire in case everything went tits up. I'd given Freespire a dry run on an old Dell PC which I'd had lying around.
If you do a default install (and take over the entire disk) then the install is entirely painless, and slightly easier than installing Windows XP.
Setting up a dual boot on FreeSpire through was less straight forward. Choosing an "Advanced" install gave me a list of the current partitions, but no way to resize them. It recommended rebooting and choosing the third option to amend the partitions.
The third option turned out to be the graphical safe mode - nothing to do with resizing the disk. In the end I turned to an old Ubuntu CD and used that to resize the Windows XP partition. Returning to Freespire with 20 gig of free space I tried the advanced install again - even with free space on the drive there was no way of creating partitions.
Bugger.
Back into Ubuntu and I created a large main partition and smaller swap one. Returning to FreeSpire and this time I was able to select my new partition ready for the install. But wait, even though the partition was available and selected there was still no option to continue the install. Yes folks, we have hit the curse of the 800x600 screen resolution.
The "next" button was hidden off the bottom of the screen. Hitting "Tab" a couple of times then pressing "Enter" got me onto the next stage of the install and after that it was plain sailing. Right up to the point where I re-booted.
Grub came up, but no option for my Windows installation.
Aaaaaargh!
Luckily there was an option to redetect and after running that and rebooting again an option for Windows XP did appear.
But enough about the install. Once I had Freespire up and running it actually works rather well. My wireless card was detected and easily runs as well as it does on Windows XP. Connecting to my wireless network was a snap using the provided tools. The onboard sound card runs well, everything feels nice and snappy.
A real bonus is the CNR (Click 'n' Run) service. You don't need to register to run it (although it is free to do so if you wish), and installing additional software is as simple as choosing it from the list and clicking "Install". I've already added "The Gimp" and "Amarok" onto the laptop and I've got to say it was entirely painless.
Another "good thing" is that MP3s work from the outset. Flash is also pre-installed (so YouTube works out of the box). In fact, as far as multimedia goes Freespire is as good as it gets. All the codecs are legally licensed versions and I can safely say that this is a Linux distro that is squarely aimed at giving as good a user experience out of the box as you are likely to find.
Freespire looks good, is nippy enough to install on low-end hardware (P2 class and above) and feels like a modern operating system should.
Overall I've got to say that I've been pleasantly surprised at just how well it works. Yes, the install was a bit quirky (if you want to install alongside Windows that is) but once it is on the whole thing runs really well.
I'm going to stick with it for a while and see if it holds up to prolonged usage. But so far, so good!
Update (11/4/2008)
In the interests of fairness, I'm going to admit something. The install instructions were correct. If you boot into the "Live CD" environment then the partition manager is right there on the desktop.
D'oh!
I've stuck with FreeSpire for a couple of weeks now - and it really does work like a charm. In fact, I'm currently playing with an old Toshiba Satellite 4600, which also works really well with FreeSpire. High resolution graphics, decent performance, the built in wireless card also works out of the box too.
Friday, 5 October 2007
Linux on HP OmniBook XE2
(last updated 07/10/2007)
Sometimes working in IT does have its benefits. Take today for example. We´ve been clearing out some of our old hardware, and amongst the 80486, Pentium I and Pentium IIs was a small stack of old laptops. Most of them were digital doorstops, but there was a stack of three HP OmniBook XE2s. All three of them had problems - but thankfully not the same problem, so I was able to swap things around a bit and come out with a working (if low-spec) laptop.
The spec of the rescued laptop is a Celeron 433, 160 meg RAM, 40GB hard drive, 800x600 resolution display. Although the laptop doesn´t have any in-built network ports I do have an old wireless card that I´ve wanted to try.
I wanted to test the laptop out with Linux, but the only distro I had to hand was an old beta version of Freespire, but what the Hell, at least I could use it as a quick test even if I was going to replace it with Ubuntu later on.
The install was straight forward, taking around half an hour. I accepted the defaults and took over the entire hard drive. Everything (including the sound card) was detected OK. So far, so good.
Now here is a good thing. Freespire auto detected my wireless card and it works fine with my home network. In fact, I´m posting this from the Laptop.
I´m probably going to install something a bit more lightweight on this (probably Slackware), but I´ve got to admit that I am impressed with how easily everything was installed, and how little configuration was required.
I´m going to play around a bit more with this - who knows, I might even keep Freespire on for a few days.
. . . .
Update #1 - 6/10/2007
Or maybe not. One problem with Freespire is that it is dog slow on older hardware. This is a shame - as overall the distro seemed rather nice. Click'n'Run works well for installing additional software and updates, but the laptop just seemed to be running slower than my old Pentium MMX 233 laptop. I'm not too sure if this was entirely Freespires fault, as I was running on battery power so it may have stepped down the CPU speed. One good positive is that at least I know that my wireless card will work with Linux.
I did give Ubuntu Gutsy a try but couldn't get it to boot into the live CD. This is strange as Freespire is based on Ubuntu and it worked fine. I'll maybe give Ubuntu another try at a later date and see if I can figure out what is going wrong.
So instead I'm re-installing the laptop with Zenwalk, a Slackware derived distro. I've always fancied giving something like Zenwalk a shot and I'm certainly curious as to how it will compare with something more "modern" like Freespire, Ubuntu or Mandriva.
Ths Zenwalk installer is very similar to the traditional Slackware one in that it is text based. One important difference is that you don't choose the packages that need to be installed, this is a single CD with everything you need on it. I'm installing using the default options, so this will be taking over the entire hard drive and configuring the partitions itself.
The Zenwalk install took around 40 minute and takes up a similar amount of space to Freespire. One notable difference is that whilst Freespire creates one large partition, Zenwalk gives us separate Root, Home and Swap partitions. I've got to admit this is a much better way of laying out the disk, as at least if you need to re-install at some point then your home directory and files will be safe.
After the main install has finished, there are a couple of options to configure for things like the Admin password, adding a new user and so on, then you reboot, the sound card is detected and on you go.
Or not, as the case may be. Zenwalk uses a very minimalist desktop enviroment (XFCE) - too minimalist for my liking. Also although it detected the wireless card (whoo!), it doesn't work (boo!). It took a while to track down the problem - which turns out to be the firmware for the card (an Atmel based one) isn't included. Once I'd tracked down the firmware and copied the .BIN files into /lib/firmware, one reboot later and everything was working great.
Not a difficult thing to do once you know about it, but not really that well documented. Yes, there were warnings (available via dmesg) but how many novices are going to check there?
Oh well, at least it does work. Zenwalk certainly feels faster than Freespire, it also boots up a lot faster (around half the time that Freespire took). Right - time to play around with it a bit more.
. . . .
Update 2 - 7/10/2007
Well, Zenwalk works OK, MP3 and MPEG playback worked out of the box, USB devices are automounted, everything pretty much works as expected.
One issue I have found is with the Zenwalk tools. If you are running in 800x600 then you can't use all of the tools. This is especially true of the update tool - which although you can view the software, and add it to the list to install, the install button is hidden - presumably somewhere off the bottom of the screen.
I'm going to install KDE from the Zenwalk repositories and see how that works, as I'm still not sure about XFCE.
Sometimes working in IT does have its benefits. Take today for example. We´ve been clearing out some of our old hardware, and amongst the 80486, Pentium I and Pentium IIs was a small stack of old laptops. Most of them were digital doorstops, but there was a stack of three HP OmniBook XE2s. All three of them had problems - but thankfully not the same problem, so I was able to swap things around a bit and come out with a working (if low-spec) laptop.
The spec of the rescued laptop is a Celeron 433, 160 meg RAM, 40GB hard drive, 800x600 resolution display. Although the laptop doesn´t have any in-built network ports I do have an old wireless card that I´ve wanted to try.
I wanted to test the laptop out with Linux, but the only distro I had to hand was an old beta version of Freespire, but what the Hell, at least I could use it as a quick test even if I was going to replace it with Ubuntu later on.
The install was straight forward, taking around half an hour. I accepted the defaults and took over the entire hard drive. Everything (including the sound card) was detected OK. So far, so good.
Now here is a good thing. Freespire auto detected my wireless card and it works fine with my home network. In fact, I´m posting this from the Laptop.
I´m probably going to install something a bit more lightweight on this (probably Slackware), but I´ve got to admit that I am impressed with how easily everything was installed, and how little configuration was required.
I´m going to play around a bit more with this - who knows, I might even keep Freespire on for a few days.
. . . .
Update #1 - 6/10/2007
Or maybe not. One problem with Freespire is that it is dog slow on older hardware. This is a shame - as overall the distro seemed rather nice. Click'n'Run works well for installing additional software and updates, but the laptop just seemed to be running slower than my old Pentium MMX 233 laptop. I'm not too sure if this was entirely Freespires fault, as I was running on battery power so it may have stepped down the CPU speed. One good positive is that at least I know that my wireless card will work with Linux.
I did give Ubuntu Gutsy a try but couldn't get it to boot into the live CD. This is strange as Freespire is based on Ubuntu and it worked fine. I'll maybe give Ubuntu another try at a later date and see if I can figure out what is going wrong.
So instead I'm re-installing the laptop with Zenwalk, a Slackware derived distro. I've always fancied giving something like Zenwalk a shot and I'm certainly curious as to how it will compare with something more "modern" like Freespire, Ubuntu or Mandriva.
Ths Zenwalk installer is very similar to the traditional Slackware one in that it is text based. One important difference is that you don't choose the packages that need to be installed, this is a single CD with everything you need on it. I'm installing using the default options, so this will be taking over the entire hard drive and configuring the partitions itself.
The Zenwalk install took around 40 minute and takes up a similar amount of space to Freespire. One notable difference is that whilst Freespire creates one large partition, Zenwalk gives us separate Root, Home and Swap partitions. I've got to admit this is a much better way of laying out the disk, as at least if you need to re-install at some point then your home directory and files will be safe.
After the main install has finished, there are a couple of options to configure for things like the Admin password, adding a new user and so on, then you reboot, the sound card is detected and on you go.
Or not, as the case may be. Zenwalk uses a very minimalist desktop enviroment (XFCE) - too minimalist for my liking. Also although it detected the wireless card (whoo!), it doesn't work (boo!). It took a while to track down the problem - which turns out to be the firmware for the card (an Atmel based one) isn't included. Once I'd tracked down the firmware and copied the .BIN files into /lib/firmware, one reboot later and everything was working great.
Not a difficult thing to do once you know about it, but not really that well documented. Yes, there were warnings (available via dmesg) but how many novices are going to check there?
Oh well, at least it does work. Zenwalk certainly feels faster than Freespire, it also boots up a lot faster (around half the time that Freespire took). Right - time to play around with it a bit more.
. . . .
Update 2 - 7/10/2007
Well, Zenwalk works OK, MP3 and MPEG playback worked out of the box, USB devices are automounted, everything pretty much works as expected.
One issue I have found is with the Zenwalk tools. If you are running in 800x600 then you can't use all of the tools. This is especially true of the update tool - which although you can view the software, and add it to the list to install, the install button is hidden - presumably somewhere off the bottom of the screen.
I'm going to install KDE from the Zenwalk repositories and see how that works, as I'm still not sure about XFCE.
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