Freespire 1.0 Installation
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Freespire 1.0 is a Debian based Linux system. It is customised to some extent and is not a look alike of Debian or Ubuntu. It also contains a little dose of non-libre packages like Adobe Flash player and the MS Windows codecs and MP3 player, etc, all pre-loaded. It is a single CD distribution that is a live + install version. A pure OSS version is also available at their site.
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Test Hardware Setup
My system is an Intel 845 GEBV2 with a Pentium4 2.4 GHz processor with 256 MB DDR RAM. My BIOS is set to use an 8 MB video page instead of the regular 1 MB. This distro has also been successfully installed on a Celeron 2 GHz with Intel 845 GLVA board with on-board Intel LAN and 256 MB RAM.
Salient Features
The best part of this distro is that it is completely self contained with no extra download necessary and yet easy on the hardware & resource utilisation. It can give good screen resolutions on some 845 chipset motherboards that did not go beyond 640x480 in the live Ubuntu 5.10 and 6.06 distros. It is multimedia ready except for a DVD player. It has the latest Firefox and Thunderbird 1.5 versions so no updating or installation is required, unlike the case of a regular KDE environment. It uses terms like My Documents and My Computer and that makes it an ideal distro for users migrating from Windows to Linux. Another feature of this distro is that it is a live + install distro and installation time is very short. In the live as well as install option, after the preliminary desktop appears, it gives a set of options to be set, like display resolution, refresh rate, gamma, sound, network, dialup, etc. This is a very good feature which makes configuration a breeze. It's desktop looks very elegant and futuristic compared to other distros.
Compatibility With Other Distros
A note of caution. Freespire does not recognise other linux distros installed, so it will install the grub bootloader with only its own and Windows options. New Linux users who are already using another Linux distro are advised not to install Freespire, unless they have some knowledge of mounting partitions and editing grub menu files. For Windows only users there will be no problem with dual boot. After installation I was unable to boot into my existing Kubuntu 6.06 setup. Even the rescue option in the Kubuntu cd did not work. Although I mounted my partition and did a chroot, it could not do a grub-install. So I mounted the partition and added lines from Kubuntu's boot menu into Freespire's boot menu. Still Kubuntu would not boot. When it could boot into Kubuntu's single user option, I found that it did not have the savedefault line. Therefore the line was hashed in the main Kubuntu boot option. Then Kubuntu booted properly and I did a sudo grub-install /dev/hda to restore its grub. The Freespire's lines were then added to it and now I can boot into all distros. The Freespire grub menu uses a peculiar format for root=/dev/hdax. It uses root=/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/partx.
Important Points
Another important point to note is that during manual harddisk install it only allows you to select an existing partition, it does not allow you to create a new one in free space or delete a partition. So you will have to do it manually before you install Freespire. That can be done by first booting live and using fdisk and then rebooting again to install. When Freespire installs, it will ask for a user name and below that ask for an admin password. This actually is not the admin/root password but the user's password. After logging in as user, do a sudo passwd root and enter a new root password. With this password, su as root add edit the /etc/sudoers file to add the user with proper sudo privileges and remove the no password option for root. This is necessary for proper security. Exit from su and you never need to login again as root.
Actual Usage
I was able to play a VCD on the Media Player and sample .oog files on Real Player. Firefox already had flash built-in so I could play on-line videos too (from the reuters.com site). There is a package manager called CNR which requires a free subscription. It asks for an email address and password. Please don't put your email password there. You leave it blank and create a separate password later in the next screens. However, I found later that apt-get works in command line and requires no log-in. It's repos are already in the list. In the X terminal, first run sudo apt-get update, let all the 156 repo lists get updated and then run sudo apt-get install synaptic. This will install the GUI for apt. Run this package after installation and for the first time it will again update information from 156 repos but this time very fast and you now have a shopping list of about 20K packages to view and choose from. Thunderbird does not use its default .thunderbird directory. It uses .lmail and one simply has to open a backed up .thunderbird and copy all its contents into the .lmail directory. Firefox uses .linspire to save the user profile in the user's home directory.
Summary
So overall this distro is great for Windows to Linux users as it saves a lot of time in getting latest packages and codecs. Its only a little different compared to other debian distros, yet it is debian.
Rony.
