Put Freespire Linux to Work

Freespire is the new, community-supported version of the commercial/proprietary Linspire Linux distribution. While Linspire has been derided as "Linux with training wheels," both Freespire and Linspire are well-suited to serious business and home applications.

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.