Download Easy

As i had mentioned before the entire desktop , icons , fonts are extremely user friendly . You would find all kind of user friendly icons in the task bar at the bottom including one for Trash , Power off , lock , Time , Date , Web Browser , IM , Email etc .


Desktop has ICONS for CNR (Which is a tool for installing applications easily ) , Browsing Network Share and Computer for accessing resources of the computer .

The first time you boot into Freespire , a wizard like tool is loaded that helps you configure your newly installed Freespire system .

Now, even though my system was running on 256 Megabytes of RAM i didnt notice any significant delay or performance lag while using freespire this is really good unlike operating systems like Vista which require ridiculously large amount of RAM to work properly atleast this is good for people like me who are stuck with old pcs .

3. Application Set

Even though the entire installation of Freespire comes on a single CD , it has a wide array of applications . There is entire Open Office Suite which is a very popular office productivity application and alternative to popular Microsoft Office on Windows platform , There are a number of simple games to help you fight your boredom ,then for Internet browsing there is Firefox loaded with all the plug-ins like flash and java etc, there is a tool for downloading torrent and making VoIP calls over the Internet and there are hosts of other open source applications as well. Freespire is based on 2.6.20-16 kernel .

Now besides all the popular common application which are found in most other Linux distributions , freespire is unique in the sense they support/have developed/developing a number of good desktop applications like LPhoto for Photo management , Lsongs which is a audio player , Nvu for web page development(Not included with Freespire 2.0) and inclusion of these friendly application is one thing that might tempt people to try freespire out .


Besides these Freespire has included support for number of proprietary file formats (means ability to play different audio / video files and display different types of files ) , Java , Flash , Adobe Acrobat (.pdf) files , Windows Media FIles , MP3 files, RealPlayer 10 (for RealMedia files) etc are all supported out of the box and there is no need for installing any additional plug-in to play/use these file formats .



Freespire also includes modified Firefox Web Browser and Thunderbird email client , it is modified in the sense that freespire team has customized it to increases its over all friendliness .

Now , application installation is one thing which freespire/linspire from the initial days have stressed on and have wonderful tool called CNR(Click and Run) allowing users to easily install free/ closed source applications(after paying) from the Internet with few mouse clicks . Now because of some reason i wasnt able to start CNR on my test system (gave me Segmentation fault :( ) , but trust me i have used CNR before and it really makes application installation easy for Linux newbies .

Another thing which i particularly liked was i could easily browse all the computers on my LAN painlessly through "Network Share manager " , now in other distributions which i have tried its bit difficult to share files with computers on the Lan running operating system other than Linux .

Another important thing , since freespire is based on Ubuntu Linux so with a little bit of tweaking its also possible to use the Ubuntus repositories and synaptic tool to install applications on the freespire system .


Hardware Support

Overall i didnt have any kind of problems with any of my hardware , all my drivers on my IBM Thinkpad worked well under Freespire , i tried connecting in my Sony Erricson k750i phone and it was instantaneously recognized by freespire and mounted .Similarly my Video iPod was automatically mounted on connecting it . Overall hardware support seems quite satisfactory and infact freespire in their website claim that they have added proprietary drivers to improve overall freespires usage experience .

From Freespires Website : -

Proprietary drivers are added to expand hardware compatibility and provide optimum 3D graphic card support, better WiFi support, and more.

Here is the entire list of Proprietary codecs and Drivers supported by Freespire : - http://wiki.freespire.org/index.php/Summary_of_Proprietary_Components

Whats Missing : -

Now overall freespire does seem to be promising but there are few things that they could work on , now even though Freespire is based on Ubuntu they have removed the Synaptic front-end now they could include Synaptic in the distribution too . Yes they are promoting their own subscription service CNR but theres no harm in including Synaptic as well .

Secondly as i have already mentioned before there should be more options during the partition stage of the installation

and finally they could include some sort of Wizard or an application to allow users to Sync their data with Windows and other Linux installation easily it could be wonderful addition to the distribution .

Conclusion :

Overall i have been highly impressed by the usability of the freespire linux distribution , its extremely simple , installation of new application is just a click away and support for all proprietary formats is added out of the box , this distribution can just get better with every release . its one linux distribution i would suggest to people who want to actually use Linux without spending too much of their energy learning how linux works .


Article Written by : -
Ambuj Varshney <>
For Linux on Desktop Blog
(http://linuxondesktop.blogspot.com)
(C) 2007, Ambuj Varshney