Put Freespire Linux to Work

Both also offer good solutions for customers who are tired of dealing with Windows' stability and security issues—or who would like to add multimedia features for work or play. Linspire and Freespire are both inherently immune from Windows malware. And both come with a good set of built-in applications that can easily be added to.

In this Recipe, I'll discuss what Linspire and Freespire actually do, and show you how to set up Freespire for full multimedia. The big difference between Linspire (paid) and Freespire (community supported) is that Freespire, unlike Linspire, doesn't do multimedia out-of-the box

Standard Checklist for Desktop OS Functionality

An OS needs to either support the following features out-of-the-box, or be easily upgradeable to provide these functions:

• Wired network support
• Printer
• Multimedia: Any home/SOHO user expects it, and corporations increasingly deliver multimedia internal content to their own employees.
• Scanner
• Digicam support: No longer optional, as this is also in the "expected" category for either business or personal use.
• Wireless support: Especially for laptop owners.

Both Freespire and Linspire do an excellent job of providing this functionality. Linspire has it out of the box, and Freespire can easily be upgraded to provide it.

What about backup solutions? I'd include that, except that Windows doesn't have a built-in backup solution out of the box, either. More to the point, the great majority of users don't demand backup capability.

Also, while Linux offers excellent core command-line components for backup like rsync (drive mirroring) and dar (creates compressed backup sets for C/DVD backup), dar doesn't have a good GUI yet. The good news is that Keep—available via Click and Run (CNR), the user-friendly, single-click automated installer—will probably turn into a good drive-mirror solution based on rdiff-backup as soon as one major bug is fixed. Keep 0.4 (with the bug fix) is available now as a build-from-source program at the Keep Project page. The current version of Keep (available via CNR as of this writing as version 0.3) is the version with the bug.

For non-GUI backups, I've written backup bash shell scripts for rsync and dar which should be usable by any user computer-literate enough to type a program name into a command line. You can find them in my earlier TechBuilder recipe "Cloning a Linux Hard Drive".

Most users who back up will do so with a DVD-R if a burner is included in the system. I discuss this below. A DVD-burning app should be included in a box with a DVD burner in it, and K3b is installed with the distribution.

Purchase Cost for Linspire/Freespire Configurations

Unlike many Linux distros, Linspire is not free. What you pay depends on which form of Linspire you buy and whether you buy it as an end user or reseller. Freespire is the community/supported version of Linspire, and it is free. You can download the ISO for burning to CD from this Freespire.com download page. Instructions on how to burn an iso to CD are available there.

Freespire or Linspire? You basically have three choices:

• Freespire, OSS: Free, but for Free and Open-Source Software (FOSS) purists only. It offers no multimedia support and no proprietary drivers like the ones needed to enable certain kinds of audio, video, chips and peripherals.
• Freespire, non-OSS: Free. Contains driver support that the OSS-only installation doesn't. In my opinion, this is the best choice for a system builder, especially if you're planning to build more than just a few systems.
• Linspire: Retails for $59.95 in the box, $49.95 via download. The wholesale price is $21.95. You can purchase a retail version as download or order a boxed version at Linspire.com.
  • If you end up buying Linspire, here's what you will get for your money:
    • Full multimedia support built-in. No installation is necessary, either for you or your customers.
    • A VAR revenue-sharing program at http://partners.linspire.com/, which provides discounts on Linspire itself under which some support is provided both direct to your end users and to you. To take advantage of this, you must register and then provide your users with "gold master" ISOs. The download is free, but the licenses must be purchased from the Linspire Partners Buy Products page. (You must be logged in to access.)
    • Marketing materials, including a "Powered by Linspire" sticker, quick-start guide, and recovery disk.
  • Linspire/Freespire System Installation
  • I recommend downloading and burning the iso to a CD. It fits on a single disc. Simply set the BIOS boot order from C/DVD before the hard drive. The installation iso can be used as a "live CD." I recommend testing it on your intended computer hardware-peripheral configuration that way. In fact, I now recommend that all distros that fit on live CDs or DVDs be tested that way.
  • Freespire handled everything except my printer; it even brought up my wireless interface without a problem, something I've never seen a Linux distro do before. Checking via Live CD will save you a lot of headaches. Anything that comes up can be made to work on a regular install. Even if it doesn't work, you can find out why it didn't, and replace whatever needs replacement before you try to install it for real.
  • The Linspire Linux distribution (Freespire is a subset of Linspire) is a 32-bit OS. The folks at Linspire.com say it will work just fine on 64-bit systems, but will not take advantage of all the features, such as improved throughput based on the handling of eight bytes at a time instead of four.
  • If you plan to run Linspire or Freespire on a 64-bit processor/motherboard configuration, I'd check into driver support for motherboard chipsets /video/audio before buying. I'm having an "interesting" time finding reasonably priced, integrated 64-bit motherboards for my own planned upgrades. If you have some laying around, try the LiveCD. The ones that work are the ones you'll want to build customer boxes around.
  • Here's a screenshot of the Linspire desktop:
  • Freespire, the First Time
  • The versions of Linux software available within Freespire/Linspire are recent, but neither leading- nor bleeding-edge. The advantage is that the software has had its bugs fixed. But it may also lack features, available in newer versions, that users actually need. Drivers are a kernel function, so the later the kernel, the more drivers are likely to be built in.
  • For experienced Linux users: I found that the current kernel is v2.6.13.2, and the default desktop is a modified KDE. There's a v2.+ version Novell-branded Open Office with a limited choice of fonts; even Arial was unavailable. There's a copy of Firefox, current as of when I got the disk. Of course, Firefox v2 is out now, but v2 isn't ready for upgrade via CNR yet.
  • When it came to networking, Freespire found my Ethernet card and set it up correctly. No problems. For my wireless network, I have a D-Link G122B1 / Ralink RT2570 chipset. Freespire found my card and set it up correctly. No problems. This is the first time any Linux distribution I've tested managed that feat!
  • Automatic wireless-driver installation worked because the vendor, Linspire.com, built the Ralink drivers into the distribution. But this doesn't mean you can buy any D-Link G122 and have it work. The G122C2 uses an entirely different chipset and driver, and I don't know whether 'spire supports it. You can find the full model/revision numbers on a printed label on the side of the package.
  • The ndiswrapper software is intended to permit the use of Windows drivers for wireless chipsets within Linux, in theory making it possible to run almost any wireless chipset regardless of whether it has a Linux driver. Unfortunately, my experience with ndiswrapper has not been good. If it works for you, great. But if you haven't purchased a wireless adaptor and plan to, it will be better to go with the drivers compiled into 'spire natively. Try ndiswrapper only if you already have a chipset that is not supported by 'spire out of the box.
  • Here's the Linspire.com wireless Hardware Compatibility list. If you need wireless connectivity and don't have an adaptor, this is probably the best starting point for picking one. I say "starting point," because vendors are constantly changing wireless chipsets on what is nominally the same model. For example, I gave my model number as G122-B1, but other G122s run different chipsets, and my wireless set up would break immediately if I plugged in a B2.
  • If you already have a wireless adaptor, don't assume it won't run simply because it's not on the list. For example, my wireless adaptor is not on the list, yet it works. A better way to find out is simply to run the LiveCD on anything you've already got, and then determine whether it runs.
  • Some USB wireless adaptors can be found at Linspire.com's Hardware Compatibility list. But if you're buying a new unit, you're better off using PCI on a desktop platform and Cardbus on a wireless platform. In my opinion, the combination of USB and wireless for Linux doesn't work very well.
  • Here's a Linspire.com Community Forum discussionon wireless setup. If your wireless adaptor isn't supported in the original distribution, Linspire.com offers ndiswrapper-utils v1.3, which provides support for 3Com, Atheros, Belkin, Broadcom, Cisco Aironet, D-Link, InProcomm, Intel Centrino, Marvell, RaLink, Realtek, SMC and TI wireless chipsets.
  • For laptop configurations with wireless, be sure the connection works before you replicate it to all your Linux laptop customers. Also, keep an eye on what your wireless device vendor ships; make sure the wireless adaptor still works with 'spire software before you find out from your customers that it doesn't.
  • Setting up Root for Better Security
  • In 'spire, you used to have to run as root all the time. For anyone who considers security in computers connected to the Net, this is a problem. Much of the inherent security advantage Linux has over Windows is precisely that one ordinarily runs in userspace where programs can't install themselves, and one gets root privileges—the ability to install programs and alter critical configurations—only when necessary.
  • The other advantage, of course, is that Linspire can install a huge number of applications, including proprietary apps, via a couple of mouse clicks. Linspire.com recently made its CNR repository available to Freespire users, as well, with the non-proprietary apps (actually, most) available free of charge. Some applications—Win4Lin, for instance—still have to be paid for. There are situations where one doesn't want everybody with user access to a machine to be able to install at will.
  • Unfortunately, while 'spire has separated the root account from the user account, the default login is to the administrator password anyway. You can fix it, like so:
    • Set up the root account using the instructions from this page, Creating a Root Login Account, on the Freespire Community Wiki site.
    • Set up the user account so this is the default login using the instructions from the page entitled Making Admin Accounts More Secure. Again, this is from the Freespire Community Wiki site.
  • Freespire/Linspire Support
  • Using Google's "site: operator" function lets you see into the Linspire.com Knowledge Base supporting both Linspire and Freespire. So if you're looking for information, you might want to make this search engine your first stop. For more on Google's site: operator, scroll down on Google's Advanced Operators page.
  • To clarify, if you want to search the Linspire.com Knowledge base directly from Google, use the following format in a Google site: operator search box:
  • keyword1 keyword2 site:linspire.com
  • with keyword being any word you think is likely to uniquely occur on a page discussing the problem you're trying to find out about.
  • Note that you can use a phrase as a keyword if you put it in enclosed quotes. For example: "hard drive error" site:linspire.com.
  • This will find any incidence of the phrase "hard drive error" on the site, probably either in the Knowledge Base or the user forums. Program Installation
  • Here are the ways you can install programs on Linspire or Freespire. First, let's look at the "Click aNd Run" (CNR) icon that you click to get single-click installs:
  • Here's a screenshot of CNR browser showing the CNR home page:
  • CNR refers to the totally automated, Web-based 'spire installation tool. Basically, you go to the CNR Warehouse site using the internal CNR browser activated with the green circular running-man icon (called "Install" icon in rest of this recipe) in the status bar at the bottom right of the screen. It will open a browser and take you to the CNR Warehouse home page. To find a program, use the site's internal search engine. Here's a screenshot of the CNR program-installation page:
  • The Scribus program displayed on the installation page above is a desktop publishing (DTP) program intended to do the sorts of job that Quark Xpress or Pagemaker do in the Win/Mac world. The green bar superimposed over "Install product, and Scribus" is a progress bar that shows the progress of the installation process.
  • To install a program, click on the icon, then wait for the "installation complete" prompt to show on your Desktop. If it's a GUI program, find the program icon or menu entry and start running it. If it is a CLI program, it won't have a program icon or menu entry, so you must open a terminal and enter the command name to access the program. To find the command name, scroll down the page until you find the specifications link on the page. Then look for the file name on the bottom.
  • Experienced Linux users may be disturbed and annoyed by the way Linspire.com sometimes renames applications to give them a proprietary look. For example, Ksnapshot has been renamed Screen Capture. This is especially annoying when you look for one of these apps by program name in the CNR Warehouse. (Ksnapshot is the screenshot utility program I used to capture screenshots for this Recipe.)
  • Unfortunately, seeing the "success" prompt after you run the tool does not guarantee that the installed program will work properly. (This seems to be true of all automated installers, including ones for Windows.) But at least the odds are in your favor. For anything you're thinking of installing, carefully view the user 1-to-5-star ratings and comments in the CNR Warehouse Web pages. Bad ratings and critical comments suggest you won't like it, either.
  • Here is how Linspire.com looks via Firefox:
  • To use CNR, you have to first set up a CNR account at the CNR Warehouse. To access the CNR Warehouse from a regular browser, go to the Linspire.com site, and click the upper CNR tab.
  • Start an account by going to the "create account" link and putting in your username and password. Then, look for a program using the search text-entry window; click Go. This will take you to a page with brief program descriptions, assuming your search found something. To get to the program description, click the program title link. To install, click the Install icon. A progress bar will appear. Once it says "done," it is. Find the icon; if it's not on the desktop, go to the Start menu and look for it in the most logical category. Then run it. If there is no icon, try opening a terminal window and type in the program name.
  • You can also create an "aisle" on the site once you have created an account. To do this, log in, click the My.Linspire tab, and then click to "My Aisles" in the left menu. Next, click New Aisle.
  • An "aisle" is a collection of software you are considering or planning to download or buy. There are also "aisles" of various software collections by Linspire.com for specific purposes (for example, business-oriented software) to help you find software you might not have thought of otherwise. To add things to your aisle in the CNR Warehouse, click the tan circular icon with the three branching vertical lines on each item you want to add. If you're out of the office, you can also log into the CNR Warehouse via any browser from anywhere.
  • Here's the CNR Installed Programs display:
  • You can find the applications you installed by clicking the Products tab, as shown above.
  • If you want to buy any of the various proprietary Linux applications from various vendors through Linspire.com, to support payment you'll have to open the account tab for entering your address information. This must match whatever is on your credit/debit card.
  • Since the CNR website search engine is clunky, I'll be giving URLs for CNR Warehouse, which is what Linspire.com calls its automated installer repository apps. So you can cut and paste URLs from this article straight into the CNR browser to get there.
  • For support other than for installation, try the onsite forum first. Then go find the vendor or developer site—especially if you paid for the program.
  • Alternative Program Installation Methods
  • You can also use the standard Debian methods of installation for programs unavailable via CNR Warehouse:
    • dpkg (manual binary application installer, Debian equivalent of RedHat rpm)
    • apt-get (including the automated apt-get installer, via Synaptic)
    • build from source
  • But use these methods carefully, since none of the standard methods knows about CNR. The wrong package installation might break it, which takes a lot of fun out of any future program installations.
  • If you're going to make a major software change without using CNR, first do a complete backup. But I doubt any customer who basically wants a computing appliance is going to try either apt-get or build-from-source, let alone do a manual package installation.
  • If you're unfamiliar with Debian, but familiar with rpm-based manual package installations like RedHat or Fedora Core, the standard stand-alone manual package installation command is:

# dpkg "I packagename.deb

• • Remember, manual package installation means dependencies are your problem. For more information on dpkg, check the man file ($ man dpkg) or Google on: dpkg how-to. To install a program using the apt-get automated installer, open the console and type:

# apt-get install packagename

• • Apt-get Repository Set Up
  • This is the same apt-get automated installer used on several other distributions. You can also use this with non-Linspire repository sites. In fact, if you plan to get full multimedia running on Freespire, you must use it.
  • But be careful. If you see in your console that apt-get is about to grab dozens or hundreds of dependencies to install a program you asked it to install, stop it immediately. Then unplug the network cable, if necessary. If it's grabbing that many dependencies, you're liable to find your Freespire box is about to convert itself to a straight Debian setup. And your CNR setup and installed applications are going to become very, very questionable in terms of function. For information how to add repositories, see the Multimedia section below.
  • To install the synaptic GUI for apt-get, open the CNR browser and go to: the Synaptic Installer page. There, click the install icon. Then open the synaptic icon. You might not want to do this on a machine you're selling to end users, because Synaptic provides easy access to the non-standard Debian repositories. Installing Printers
  • For printers which are supported with the distribution (either Linspire or Freespire) as installed, go to the Linpire.com page called How do I install my printer and print a test page in Linspire Five-0?.
  • If you're doing this from Freespire, do not use the Linspire customer support page. Use the Linspire Knowledge Base or Freespire Forum for support if you can't find an answer via Google. I'd try the Freespire Forum first. It's structured to give solutions that don't depend on CNR. Up until a few weeks ago, CNR was unavailable to Freespire users.
  • I have a Canon PIXMA IP3000 for which no Linux distributions seem to provide a driver. So I downloaded the Turboprint Driver Package for Brother, Canon, Epson and HP. This required me to download for my 'spire Debian-based distribution as "build from source" as a tgz tarball. The tgz extension means the archive uses gunzip compression and tar to collect the directory structure. A .tgz (or tar.gz) extension tarball is like a zip file using the recursive option, in which a directory structure and files are archived. When unarchived, the directory structure appears with all the files where they belong. Simply follow the instructions at the above link to make this work.
  • I then clicked the Turboprint setup icon and added the printer from within the setup application. The printer immediately started running in demo mode. But the demo printed the Turboprint logo over a large enough chunk of text, making it useless as a general printer. If Turboprint makes it possible for your printer to print, I recommend that you buy the license key; it costs $37.
  • Customers can find out if printers they wish to buy are supported by Linspire.com by going to the Linspire Printer Support page. Further, you can find the Turboprint supported printer list from the Printers Supported by Turboprint page. Unfortunately, neither of these pages include Turboprint as a CNR application. I've told Linspire.com they need to do this. So hopefully, by the time you read this, they'll have made it available for installation via CNR. If a user has an existing printer, the quickest way to find out if it's supported is to plug into a 'spire workstation and just try it.
  • Scanner
  • Any scanner in this list from the SANE project with "basic," "good," or "complete" entries should work with a Linux desktop.
  • Install via CNR like so:
    • Go to the sane-utils download page. Note: SANE stands for "Scanner Access Now Easy" and is an API which provides standardized access to any raster image scanner hardware, including flatbed scanner, hand-held scanner, video- and still-cameras. The SANE standard is free, and its discussion and development are open to anyone.
    • Next, go to the xsane-common download page.
  • Now, open a terminal and type:

$ sudo xsane

• • PDA Applications While the Palm PDA user base isn't a large one anymore, for those of us who still use Palm PDAs, Palm computer desktop software is really handy in helping to get information into and out of our PDAs. Just open the Palm Pilot desktop from Launch > Run Programs > Utilities > PalmPilot Tool . Start the wizard from the file menu. Use the "Automatically Detect Device and Username" button to let it find the device, and push the hotsync Palm button. You'll hear the triple beep and it will find your device. Check the Settings tab, as you'll want to change the speed from 9600 to as fast as your device will support. I tried 56K, but you may want to try even higher speeds. Then push the backup button and restart Hotsync. Enjoy your synced-up backup! Here's the Kpilot Palm PDA Desktop Configuration:
  • 
    Still, if that fails, read through this page from Linspire.com , called How do I configure J-Pilot with my Palm Pilot? Here's a shot of a PDA external card mounted on the desktop:
    For the external card, turn on the Palm application Card Export II, and plug in the device. It will show up as the Softtick Card Export icon on the Desktop. You should back it up immediately to a directory on your hard drive, and putting that directory on your Desktop should work. (Or put it anywhere convenient). With a regular setup, you're supposed to unmount the icon. But here, it seems to want you to unmount via right-click menu first. My advice: Try it and see if it works. If you don't have that program, mount the card with a USB card reader plugged into your 'spire box. Unfortunately, Linspire.com doesn't have a hardware compatibility page for USB card readers yet. As a white-box builder, you probably stock some. I suggest you try some and see. Plug appropriate media into one and plug in the card reader on a box on which you've got 'spire or a LiveCD running. If an icon automatically appears on the desktop, it works. Put it on the "recommended hardware" list for your customers. Camera Set-Up When it comes to digital cameras, most customers use one of just three main kinds:
    • USB Mass Storage: Just another USB flash memory device from the computer's viewpoint, containing image and perhaps audio and video files. What's in here depends on the camera capabilities and what the user did with them. JPG image and ASF (MS proprietary MP4 format) files are not uncommon. The flash drive within the camera is mounted like any other flash drive: plug it in to a USB port and do whatever works with your distro. Open the camera flash device as just another directory off the camera file system mount point.
    • USB PTP Class: Uses the Pictbridge standard to let cameras communicate directly with computers and directly to printers which support the standard. The Lphoto camera program packaged with 'spire should deal with this, though it may not support all the camera's capabilities. It is discussed in more detail below.
    • Various proprietary formats: Lphoto should deal with some of these, too.
  • You can plug a USB Mass Storage camera directly into your computer, and have the internal files show up as a directory on your desktop. Here's a shot of a USB mass storage camera directly mounted on a desktop:
  • 
    To do so, just plug it in. The camera mounts automatically as a HD (two duplicate icons), but to two targets and icons:
    • /mnt/dos
    • /mnt/dos2
  • Open the bottom of the two icons (dos2), then open DCIM, and then keep opening until you get to wherever your camera puts its images. Store image files wherever you like on the computer. See thumbnails of the images in that directory with the photo browser of your choice. Also, "photo browser" is a search term which works at CNR Warehouse. Or, you can open it via Lphoto as follows: First try: Launch > Multimedia and Design > Lphoto. Start Lphoto and open File > Get Info. Click bottom Import tab, push Rescan button. (The camera name should show up at this point.) Then push the Import button. This is the first GUI camera application I've ever used with Linux that actually worked with my own USB Mass Storage camera, an Aiptek DV4200. Here's the Lphoto camera desktop:
  • 
    Based on the dependencies list for the Open Source version of Lphoto photo application, Lphoto is yet another Gphoto2 front end with a few extra bells and whistles. Its features that aren't usual for Gphoto front ends are:
    • Web page export
    • Screensaver export
    • Video CD export (including sound)
    • The ability to deal with USB mass-storage cameras
  • If it isn't installed, you can get it via CNR Warehouse. I recommend packaging based on the gphoto2 list available on Gphoto's "recommended camera list" for your white-box packages. Also, there's a list recommended by Linspire.com (as being supported by the underlying gphoto2 program), on their page called Will my digital camera work with Linspire?. Note: The folks at Linspire.com say that Linspire supports these cameras, which is hardly surprising since gphoto2 is the basic command-line Linux application for camera support for which Lphoto acts as a feature-added front end. But it supports other cameras as well. On that list, include:
    • Check the box for the words "USB mass storage." If that's what you see, you should be able to get pictures from your camera by simply plugging its cable into a USB port. When the icon appears, double-click it. It's a directory, so move the camera files where you want them to go.
    • If you see PTP or Pictbridge mentioned in the camera information, use LPhoto and use the USB PTP setting if Lphoto doesn't find it without help.
    • If you see none of those, check the list of gphoto2-supported cameras. If the camera model isn't on the list, it probably is not supported.
    • If you already have a camera, try plugging it in without reference to the list. If an icon appears on the desktop, it's a mass storage camera, and you can deal with it as a collection of files on your camera. Or you can try the LPhoto photo application with it. If Lphoto doesn't find it by itself, try the USB PTP setting.
  • Multimedia: Here's the status of Freespire multimedia applications as installed with the original distribution:
    • Audio: MP3 already works via HelixPlayer.
    • Video formats: Requires apt-get install once xine is installed from a non-U.S. site with the codecs.
    • Flash: Flash V.7 is built-in as of my writing. To see which version is installed, go to any Web page with a Flash animation and right-click the image; the version will be in the right-click menu. If you have V7, do a search at the CNR Warehouse using "flash" as the search term. If you see the Flash 9 plug-in, just CNR-install it. A Linspire.com spokesperson told me that it's in the queue for addition to the CNR Warehouse, which means single-click install should be coming real soon now.
  • If Flash 9 still unavailable via CNR when you read this, you can find out how to do a command-line package install of this Personal Fedora Core 5 Installation Guide page. Scroll down to "Flash 9.0 Plugin Beta." Basically, you download the tarball anywhere convenient; extract the .so file, then copy the file to the browser plug-in directory. If you use other browsers, open them (if already open, close first), and see if they picked up the plug-in. If not, first try telling the browser to check for new plug-ins. If this fails, cd to the plug-in directory that needs a copy, and create a symlink like this:

# ln -s /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/libflashplayer.so libflashplayer.so

• • Do this, and when Flash is next updated, you only have to update this once and all browsers will be covered. But in most cases, your browser will have already found the plug-in within the Mozilla plug-in directory.
  • DVD Playback: Requires apt-get install, also requires packages installed via download and dpkg.manual installation. See the section entitled To Get Video (and DVD Playback) Running (below) for more on this.
  • Here's the Freespire apt-get/Synaptic repository configuration:
  • To make it possible to access the apt-get repositories required for multimedia installation via GUI, add the repositories listed in "insert" in the list featured in the "To Get Video (and DVD Playback) Running" section (below) to the synaptic apt-get GUI application like so:
  • deb http://download.videolan.org/pub/videolan/debian/ sarge main
    • deb is the installable file type, select from pull-down menu above URI
    • http://download.videolan.org/pub/videolan/debian/ is the URI
    • sarge is the distribution
    • main is the section
  • To Get Video (and DVD Playback) Running:
  • The biggest difference between Freespire and Linspire is that Linspire supports multimedia right out of the box. To provide Freespire with multimedia capabilities, you'll have to add software mostly not available via the CNR Warehouse. Here's how to do this:
    1. Add repositories to the apt-get repositories using the "insert" information below, either using synaptic or manually.
       • su " root
       • cd /etc/apt
       • nano sources.list (or fill these in on the Synaptic repository configuration shown above)
       • insert: deb ftp://ftp.kulnet.kuleuven.ac.be/debian/ stable main contrib non-free
       • insert: deb http://download.videolan.org/pub/videolan/debian/ sarge main
       • deb-src http://download.videolan.org/pub/videolan/debian/ sarge main
    2. Install xine
    3. Get libdvdcss2_1.2.9-1_i386.deb and perhaps libdvdcss2-dev_1.2.9-1_i386.deb from here, install via dpkg
    4. Open xine and play video or a DVD. (and almost any other media content)
  • In the course of installation, xine found w32codecs as a dependency and installed it. This saved me the trouble of looking for it. The license issue has to do with w32codecs, which contain proprietary codecs, and are unavailable in the U.S.
  • As soon as I got xine installed, I opened the program. It handled everything I threw at it: avi, mov, mpg, wmv files, and DVD movies. Also, Lplayer (the Lindows version of Mplayer) should work at this point, too.
  • Windows Emulators
  • Why run Windows on top of Linux? To gain:
    • Stability and Windows malware-immunity of an underlying Linux OS
    • Direct access to Linux applications
    • Direct access to Windows applications without dual boot
    • The ability to replace Windows legacy apps with Linux apps for the road ahead one-by-one.
    • The ability to easily use both Windows and Linux apps on the same files, even at the same time. While I don't recommend this, it can be helpful in work with some graphics files.
  • VMware: This can be installed on 'spire, but not via CNR. It supports Clipboard between guest and host OSes. Clipboard makes cut and paste possible between a Linux application and a Windows application running as a VMware client.
  • You can also install other kinds of OSes, including other Linux distros and BSD (see the stuff about workstations) at the Linspire.com page, called Installing VMware.
  • This link is a how-to for running Freespire as a guest on a VMware workstation.
  • Win4Lin: This is a Windows-specific emulator that runs on the Linux OS.
  • Win4Lin 9.x (requires Windows 9.x): Available via CNR, but unworkable on the included kernel. It's the same version kernel as the one I couldn't get to work after installing the Win4Lin kernel patches. So if you change distros with an existing Win4Lin 9.x install in place, it's practically guaranteed to break!
  • Win4Lin Pro: Available, but not recommended. It doesn't support Clipboard between Linux and Windows, which is the main point of running a Windows emulator instead of dual boot.
  • The reviews on this Win4Lin Pro CNR page are all negative. I didn't test it, since I don't care whether it works or not. Potential users, you have been warned.
  • If you need Windows emulation and your CPU has hardware support for hardware virtualization (Intel " VT, AMD - Pacifica), look at Xen emulation. This is as much as I can reasonably say; my current CPU does not support hardware virtualization.
  • Xen: Virtualization was not tested by me. Until my next upgrade, I won't have a CPU installed with hardware virtualization support. Xen 3.0 is available by CNR Linspire.com's search results page here.
  • Presumably, the next move is to install Win 9x/XP/2003 or whatever *nix distros you'd like as guests. However, I'm not certain about whether there's a working Clipboard that will allow cut-and-paste between guest and host applications. Searches to settle this point have been futile so far. If there's no Clipboard, it has no place on a workstation desktop—though it would frequently make sense on a server install. However, Linspire and Freespire are both intended as workstation Desktop distributions, not for servers.
  • Conclusions
  • If your customer's goal is simply to use the computer for work or play without worry about malware instead of learning Linux, then the 'spire distributions do this better than any other Linux distributions I've seen. The ease of installing applications makes Windows look like something out of the early Stone Age. There are no download / unzip-dearchive / install steps. Instead, you simply "click and run"—other than multimedia setup and non-CNR apps, that is.
  • The only thing I've seen better is SLED10's ability to automate (including dependencies) from packages intended for manual package installation found anywhere on the Web. But I'm not sure this would be well-suited for the Windows power users it's really intended for.
  • My recommendations? If you are relatively inexperienced with Linux but would like to provide Linux for the occasional knowledgeable customer, then I'd join the reseller program and buy a few Linspire licenses for resale, if and when a customer wants a Linux box. But if you plan to sell many Linux boxes or appliances built around 'spire and have some Linux experience, I'd consider going with Freespire.
  • Whether you install Freespire or Linspire according to the instructions in this recipe, you'll have installed the most user-friendly of all the Linux distributions. You'll also have a computer that's free from Windows malware, while still providing the functionality most users require right out of the box, and on which CNR applications can be installed with greater ease than they can on Windows. As I hope you agree, that's a pretty good deal.
  • A. Lizard is an Internet consultant in the San Francisco Bay Area. He has been writing for technology magazines and Web sites since 1987.