Do I need to call the fire department out here over all this flaming? While this thread may be a bit ot now, I have yet to see a thread that doesn't go a bit squirly at some point, and usually in a case such as this thread has--something is mentioned about a variable of the discussion's topic and everyone kinda picks up on that variable. From there, another varaible, unrelated to the original topic, is mentioned and everyone goes with it. It isn't hard for a thread to go ot within 15, or even 10 posts. ...so please lay off JakeTate as he was simply stating a fact and his opinion, and his posts were well within the scope of our discussion.

...meanwhile, back at the ranch, I sure would like to get this Linspire port of my ISP's software (orignially written to run under Windows) to work under Debian.

Yes, it is very frustrating the way trolls disrupt convos. Sadly there are many who don't properly understand what free software is about. Enough anyway, to answer a couple of your points

I run some software on (several, different, Linux distros) written for MS Windows by another of my ISP's customers, for people to check their accounts. He had a Linux port someone did for him, but that was a while back. I researched several distros under WINE and had some interesting results.

Here is a link to his page about the product. He now provides a link to the page I wrote about it running under WINE. That second url is on a home vhost, which is up most of the time, but not all the time.

Actually Linspire when first installed will (so many people have found) work perfectly using apt.

The Linspire forums are replete (good word for a monday ) with sorry stories about when they went back to CNR it was broken.

The moral here is simple. Use CNR if you are prepared to pay the modest charge for it. It is a service not a product. Services are often charged for, like car registration, phone line rental...

If you are not prepared to use CNR, fine. Use apt or any of the other Debian install thingies.

But stick with your choice, and you'll have a "minimum of fuss" as the British Airways slogan used to go.

CNR does not charge you for downloading most of the software titles. The Click-n-Buy variant (which is part of CNR) requires you to pay a fee for software that is normally sold.

The advantage here is that the CNB fee is normally appreciably less than you would pay buying direct.

Hope that was useful.

As I said, Linspire's just a proprietarized Debian. Most things you can do with regular ol' Debian can be done just the same with Linspire, but they do some funky stuff with the Linspire kernel, among other places, to make some stuff not work outside Linspire, and that may prove significant with my ISP software but otherwise may not be noticed.

Also, my attempt to get the Windows version of this same software to work under WINe has run into a Microsoft RAS (Dial-up Networking) dependency. D'oh!

...as far as you mentioning the trolls, it looked like they were all after JakeTate this time. He just stated a fact and his opinion relating to that fact, and it was perfectly on topic with that section of the thread. Threads gradually moving off topic isn't a problem, but all the flaming by these trolls you mentioned is the problem. Here's a rundown on what I consider acceptable and not acceptable:

Topic starts about Mario, and then someone mentions Mario riding on Yoshi which shifts the perspective to Yoshi. ...then someone mentions Yoshi laying eggs and the topic then shifts more toward anatomically incorrectness as Yoshi, being a dude, cannot scientifically lay eggs. This "getting squirly" is acceptable.

Topic starts about Debian and then, out of the blue, the trolls come and change the topic to how much Member X sucks or words are inserted into Member X's mouth relating to Product X (as demonstrated here). This is not acceptable.

Tried "Freespire" ?

http://info.linspire.com/freespire/

This was a private project using Linspire (non-proprietary) source but somehow the news got out and there was total pandemonium.

You might like to try the links that page point to, which have now been redirected by the author to the new name of his project.

Ummm this may be redundant because we have discussed it on this form, I think in another thread. If so, please forgive me. I claim senile dementia, lol

The offer's now over, but was seemingly-good idea. I've seen Lindows on Linux.org as a "true" Linux, which may be part of this crazyness you described, but I have seen too many things that, say, RedHat 9 could do that Linspire 4 had trouble with, and not because of dependencies. From what I seen, I'll just hold on to my new Debian flavor and try to port my Linspire stuff to it. Being just one or two user-end packages, I see no reason why Debian shouldn't handle everything, plus other packages, such as Blender, OpenOffice, GIMP, etc. that I often use. ...and why should I CnR stuff like OpenOffice and GIMP when they're sitting right there on my Debian CD's? ...as well as my RedHat CD, my SuSE CD, Mandy, etc. Seems like nearly every flavor of Linux has this stuff installed by default. Kinda makes me feel like Linspire's a jip.

Is there more repositories that can be added to /etc/atp/sources.list?

Yes, you have the default Debian repositories (and their mirrors) but you can also find some at apt-get .org.

Most un-official repositories only contain a few programs (for example there is a repository for MPlayer but it only contains MPlayer and some tools it depends on).