Put Freespire Linux to Work

By A. Lizard

December 18, 2006

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Freespire is the new, community-supported version of the commercial/proprietary Linspire Linux distribution. While Linspire has been derided as "Linux with training wheels," both Freespire and Linspire are well-suited to serious business and home applications.

Both also offer good solutions for customers who are tired of dealing with Windows' stability and security issues -- or who would like to add multimedia features for work or play. Linspire and Freespire are both inherently immune from Windows malware. And both come with a good set of built-in applications that can easily be added to.

In this article, I'll discuss what Linspire and Freespire actually do, and show you how to set up Freespire for full multimedia. The big difference between Linspire (paid) and Freespire (community supported) is that Freespire, unlike Linspire, doesn't do multimedia out-of-the box

Standard Checklist for Desktop OS Functionality

An OS needs to either support the following features out-of-the-box, or be easily upgradeable to provide these functions:

• Wired network support
• Printer
• Multimedia: Any home/SOHO user expects it, and corporations increasingly deliver multimedia internal content to their own employees.
• Scanner
• Digicam support: No longer optional, as this is also in the "expected" category for either business or personal use.
• Wireless support: Especially for laptop owners.

Both Freespire and Linspire do an excellent job of providing this functionality. Linspire has it out of the box, and Freespire can easily be upgraded to provide it.

What about backup solutions? I'd include that, except that Windows doesn't have a built-in backup solution out of the box, either. More to the point, the great majority of users don't demand backup capability.

Also, while Linux offers excellent core command-line components for backup like rsync (drive mirroring) and dar (creates compressed backup sets for C/DVD backup), dar doesn't have a good GUI yet.

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