Freespire

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Not to be confused with SquiggleOS (formerly Freespire) .

Freespire

A screenshot of Freespire RC1
Website:	http://www.freespire.org/
OS family:	Linux
Latest stable release:	1.0.13 / August 7, 2006
Supported platforms:	i386, AMD64, IA-64

Freespire is a community-driven Linux distribution which is composed entirely of Free and open source software, while providing users the choice of including proprietary software including multimedia codecs, device drivers and application software as they see fit.

Freespire is originally derived from Linspire, a commercial operating system based on Debian GNU/Linux, and now forms the base from which new releases of Linspire are derived.

Contents 1 History 2 Features 3 Future 4 References 5 External links

[edit] History

In August 2005, a distribution Live CD based on Linspire's source pools named Freespire hit the web by accident.^[1] This distribution was created by Andrew Betts and was not produced or released by Linspire Inc. Freespire was confused by some users to be an actual product from Linspire, and at the request of Linspire the distribution adopted a development codename Squiggle^[2] and began looking for a new name. Linspire then, on the back of the generated publicity, offered users a "free Linspire" (purchase price discounted to $0) by using the coupon code "Freespire" until September 9, 2005, thereby greatly increasing its userbase.^{[citation needed]} Squiggle OS is no longer in active development.

On April 24, 2006, Linspire announced its own project named "Freespire".^[3] The new Freespire distribution was announced by Linspire President and CEO Kevin Carmony. This follows to the model of Fedora Core being supported by Red Hat and the community since 2003. Novell had also started a similar community project by the name of openSUSE for its SUSE Linux product line in the second half of 2005.

On July 14, 2006, the first beta release of Freespire became available for download.^[4]

On August 7, 2006, Freespire 1.0 was released three weeks ahead of schedule.^[5]

Eric S. Raymond, founder of the Open Source Initiative, joined Freespire Leadership Team on September 27, 2006.

[edit] Features

The distribution is a Debian-based, community-driven and -supported project tied to the commercial Linspire distribution. Freespire includes previously proprietary elements from Linspire, such as the CNR Client, while other elements, which Linspire itself licenses but does not own, like the Windows Media Audio compatibility libraries, remain closed-source. Consequently there are two versions of Freespire, one with the closed source libraries, and one, called Freespire OSS Edition, that includes only open-source components. Freespire has a number of in-house programs written in Haskell and O'Caml, such as its ISO image builder, its hardware detection and autoconfiguration, its package autobuilder and "Debian library", and also the programs managing the CGI.

Unlike Linspire version 5 and earlier, Freespire does not enable the root account by default. Instead, it gives sudo rights to all members of the admin group. However, some people claim that this is not an improvement due to the fact that the admin user can become superuser without entering a password.^[6]

[edit] Future

Freespire 2.0 (which, as of December 12, 2006, is currently under development) is slated for release in 1st Quarter 2007. This will be the first version of Freespire to include the new open-source CNR client.^[7]

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• Freespire website

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