Not free, but looks like Linspire is having a Thanksgiving weekend only 50% sale off the OS and CNR: www.linspire.com

-Cheers!

Is that the new name for the "FreeSpire" distro one of the Insiders/Members of Linspire founded ?

Here is a bump for that one. They have about 30 minutes left in their sale. Incidentally, I installed it in a partition on our "family room" computer and liked it. The only disadvantages (really) are that the installation does not include partitioning software and the wireless support is weak. As an explanation, the install is set up pretty much to take over an entire hard drive. If you want to install it to a separate partition, you must partition the disk before attempting installation. Regarding the wireless, Linspire does not support WPA encryption, although it does support WEP and no encryption, and has decent hardware detection "out of the box." You can install wpa_supplicant from the CNR warehouse that makes WPA encryption possible, but you need an Internet connection to do so. Bottom line: good for an alternative to Windows if you have a wired connection.

SquiggleOS is gaining strength in following.

http://www.squiggleos.org
http://www.alllinuxcd.com

Is it all cleaned up now? Would like to use it as a base for another project but of course dont care to get sued by the company that owns the green and blue L....

Hmm, don't realy know what you mean by "cleaned-up".

The FreeSpire project was started by a Linspire member (I even think it was an Insider) as a private project. Someone posted it to slashdot or someother site and his website got swamped by people who were interested. At that point it was still a personal project (and not completely finished if I remember correctly). He always wanted to remove the closed-source stuff and have a true "FREE" version of Linspire. AFAIK the only non-GPL stuff that was in FreeSpire when the newssites heard about it were the Linspire Audio-Tutorials (I think he didn't even know they were not GPLd).

Then Linspire asked him if he wanted to choose a diffrent name for his project since they thought FreeSpire was to close to Linspire (or something like that). He changed the name without any big problem (I think there were some false reports that Linspire sued him over the name but to my knowledge that's not true).

So I guess SquiggleOS is Cleaned-Up (specialy since the creator posted he wanted to remove the Audio-tutorials humself when he stated the project, he just didn't do it yet, or didn't find out how to do it).

If I remmeber correctly it still had L logos in places. Plus even though it is a liveCD I think it still had linspires installer on it which I am sure is a no-no...

S-OS has no installer

You sure it doesnt have one or just that it isnt called? I am worried that there is stills tuff in there that Linspire would get bent out of shape over if it started getting distributed...

I'm just gonna get over it.
GEt vmware & install XP . and use it when needed.

Well AFAIK the only NON-GPL stuff in Linspire is :

- Spoken tutorials (audio tutorials like the one you get when you 1st install Linspire).
- CNR (Click-N-Run)
- Bitstream Fonts

there could be some more but most of the stuff they release is GPLd like : Lsongs, Lphoto and NVU

I downloaded the Linspire 5-0 when it was going free and found it very easy to use coming from a windows background. Recognised everything including my broadband connection straight away.

really so how is it
(prefers) Xandros

Well compared with Slackware there was no messing with fstab to get it to recognise my USB devices, plus everything works in root (maybe bad practice but its what us window users are use to. Also layout is very windows like.

Freespire...it's funny rumors should go around saying the guy was sued by Linspire if it was only yesterday that Lindows got its own rear sued into re-naming itself Linspire. You'd think they'd be nicer.

I haven't used Linspire but there are definitely coupon codes active from time to time that let you download both Linspire and the "CNR extras"

I tried installing Linspire but it didn't work because the iso image was just larger than my CD-R capacity. But bleh