I was looking over a site that compared Redhat, SuSe, Mandrake..etc..in the hardware support areas, and Redhat completely devestated every distro. Perhaps that is what they meant...

ealm, I was referring to the subject of the post, and your opinion did not have anything to do with whether linspire is "linux". Feel free to have your opinion, it bothers me none. But you strayed from the issues me and WebX brought up. Almost like you wanted to avoid what we had to say. That was all. Please don't misinterpet my words.

Second, me buying a copy of SuSE 9.1 is a great way to show my support for them and their actions. I bought it because I use it. Its the best of the best to me. And they do not release only trivial software to the community. That comment was absurd. Yast is not trivial. It is the most comprehensive package management system I have encountered. It works, and I does what it was meant to do very well. I hope to see alot of distros begin to use it. Suse brings me value in many different ways. By being an excellent distro. By supporting open source. By just the sheer fact that they obviously aren't looking to necessarily further themselves, but see that if linux as a whole succeeds. They do. And me. And even you ealm. Hell, all of us do.

All i know is, that when i use an OS i want the experience to be as quick and painless as possible so i can get what i need to get done, done. I think all distros should come with something like Synaptic or CNR it makes it a lot easier and more efficient. i don't even mind paying for it if the companies on the list benefit from it. With longhorn on the way and MS owning a piece of Apple, there is going to be a flood of people choosing Linux as a Desktop, why not make it easy for them?

P.S. (when i was speaking of MS and Apple i was reffering to how everything is going to be propriatary. i support open source because it shares ideas with everyone, and eveyone can improve on them, not so with propriatary)

I would agree that making linux easier is key.

Exchange SuSE for Linspire and Yast for CNR and those words describe what I feel too.

I won't even comment on your "accusations" against me for not keeping 100% to the discussion you want to have...

It was the discussion the original poster wanted to have. So I'm at a loss as to why you want to argue. But in any event I'm done with this thread.

I read on the Register that Linspire gives the user root priviliges by default!? How weird is this? So much for security I guess. Anyone to confirm or deny this?

It does, but it also promps u to create a user profile when u log in for the first time.

Linspire is Linux, Linux contains three to four important things to make it Linux in my opinion.
1.The Kernel
2.The Shell
3.Programs
4.X
If it contains the fist three then its Linux, I dont see how it cant be, Does Linspire have these? Yes, then its Linux.

I think Linspire is too limited... I use Slackware because of it's openness. It doesn't lock you down to any specific choices, but lets you choose from a huge variety of solutions.

There are numerous ways to install software on it due it it's light package format.

Source (pl/tar/tar.gz/tar.bz2/etc)
Slack-packs (tgz) binaries
Redhat/Fedora AND Mandrake RPMs (rpm2tgz)
dpkg (Debian) binaries (ar xvf pkg.deb)
.bin, .run, etc, etc, etc

One thing about Linspire is, from what I hear of it (tell me if I'm wrong, I could be), is it locks you down to using only one program for every purpose. Is Lsongs the only music player available for it? What I've seen of Lsongs makes it look like a huge jukebox filled with pointless features like iTunes and MusicMatch. XMMS is perfect for music with its small interface and organization.

Also, from the looks of it, you can only use KDE in Linspire. KDE makes great tools, but its desktop environment is slow and packed with too many features. I use Fluxbox, and run KDE's tools on top of it (excluding kicker and such, just ones like konqueror for file manipulation, kmix, kmail, etc).

I was under the impression before that Linspire couldn't compile anything from source, but from this thread it sounds like you can use CNR to obtain a compiler, is this true?

I also find it a little cheap that most of their software on CNR is open source... why pay for something you can get for free?

They say that Linspire is the #1 bought distribution in the world. Well obviously considering 99% of them are free.

I think Linspire is technically Linux, but limits the user too much to be GNU/Linux.

All of this is based on what I've read about Linspire, and what I've seen in the movies shown on the Linspire site. PLEASE correct me if I'm wrong on anything

These are only good if you can use them to their fullest extent, and unless you get the dev edition of Linspire, 3 of these four are not going to do you a damned bit of good.

Hopefully with 5.0, they resolve some of those issues.

No, you can use other music players, but they are really pushing Lsongs currently. It looks alot like a certain program from KDE, but I will leave it at that. Myself, I like XMMS and MP3 blaster. I dont use my computer for really jamming tunes and watching movies though.

There is nothing wrong with using a GUI interface.

KDE is the default face however with Linspire, and you are basically stuck with it. No options to windowmanager, Gnome...Blackbox, failsafe, text prompt.....etc...The desktop does have some laggy issues, coupled with some 'timing out' issues that usually happen when you have a couple of things open at one time. One of my gripes was the fact that the multiple desktops never seemed to work as they should. If I have a web browser open in desktop 1, I should not see it as well in desktop 2.

You have to download all neccessary tools from CNR to compile from the developers Isle, which is a humongous amount.
If you want the tools, buy the developers edition, and save the headaches. My gripe with this was that at one time, apt-get, dpkg, make, make install..etc were alll part of the command line and tool interface. As it progressed however, these tools started to disappear, and the last time I used Linspire 4.5, my snaptic could not install anything. The new CNR interface allows you to do some compiling, but it was admitted in a thread that CNR does not always allow uninstallation commands for certain programs. So..in short, you better hope the program doesnt give you any problems, or have any dependency issues, otherwise you are going to see a error message on loop control.

This is a issue that has been done to death at both sites. You are paying for a service to access those programs without any need to know how to compile them for install.

Ummm,

How is lindowsOS not linux when I have installed over 20 apps using the



apt-get install synaptic

apt-get install (name of package)

apt-get update

commands in console?



Regards,


PCfixinman



BTW, I have my lindows 4.5 all setup, & never paid for or used CNR(linux is free, as it should always be).
If you know the commands it functions pretty much like every other linux distro

lol i know this has been asked a million times, but here's a million and one, how do u get apt-get working in lindows

You can apt-get just fine with LindowsOS. Just be sure not to pull down a kde library that isn't supported by lindows OS.