Freespire 3 and Linspire 7.0 Towards the end of last year a company called PC/OpenSystems announced that it had bought the trademarks for Linspire and Freespire and that a new version of both distros had been released. The announcement got a fair bit of attention as Linspire and Freespire were discontinued distros with a turbulent history. Before we get into the review proper we need to talk about the distros' past.



The past



Linspire started life in 2001 under the name Lindows. The original name was a playful reference to its ambition: developing a Linux operating system capable of running major Microsoft Windows applications. The name was changed to Linspire in 2004 after a lawsuit brought by Microsoft was settled out of court. Linspire's ambition remained the same and as part of the settlement the distro could include codecs for proprietary media formats such as MP3 and WMA.



Unsurprisingly, Linspire was often criticised by the free software community. Richard Stallman famously said of the distro that "No other GNU/Linux distribution has backslided so far away from freedom." Of course, the focus on features over freedom was exactly what made the distro appealing to many users. Back in the day Lindows/Linspire was based on Debian. The distro had to be purchased; the Wayback Machine shows the license fee was $49.95 in 2006. As far as I can tell compatibility with major Microsoft Windows applications never really materialised but the distro did introduce a graphical user interface for installing software. The feature, called Click 'N' Run (or CNR), was essentially an early software centre.



Freespire entered the stage in 2005 as a free (as in beer) version of Linspire. Both Linspire and Freespire were acquired by Xandros in 2008 and discontinued not long after. Xandros Linux also didn't survive - its latest stable release is from 2007.



The present



PC/OpenSystems, the new owner of the Linspire and Freespire trademarks, is not new to the world of Linux distros - it already develops Black Lab Linux. The company bought the trademarks to, in its own words, differentiate its product line. They are hoping Linspire will appeal to enterprise and home users alike.



Both Freespire and Linspire are derivatives of Xubuntu 16.04. The distros are only available for the 64-bit x86 architecture and Xfce is the only supported desktop environment. Freespire is still the community edition and freely downloadable while the ISO for Linspire costs $79.99. The license fee will give you a year's worth of phone and e-mail support and a system with various common proprietary codecs pre-installed. The inclusion of the codecs is no longer part of the above-mentioned settlement with Microsoft - PC/OpenSystems has to pay patent-holders to include them.



Freespire 3



I first tried Freespire. The ISO is a 1.5GB download and boots to a live environment where you can try the system before deciding whether or not to take the plunge. Freespire's desktop has a traditional look: the panel is placed at the bottom; window decorations such as title bars and buttons have a bevel effect and the wallpaper is dark blue with diagonal gradients and the Freespire logo.





Freespire 3 - Freespire's Xfce desktop

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The installer is a modified version of Ubiquity. Unfortunately, the modifications are not improvements. The first issue I encountered was that the link to the release notes on the first page of the installer took me to a dodgy on-line survey about the UK economy. I asked PC/OpenSystems how it is possible that the link to the release notes goes to a phishing site - they were able to reproduce the bug but could not explain how or why this happened. A second tweak in the installer is that the slides that are normally displayed when Ubiquity installs the system have been replaced with a tiny little window that shows information about what the installer is doing. The size of the window adjusts itself to the amount of information that needs to be displayed and therefore changes in size all the time. The installer did get the job done but it wasn't a very pleasant experience.





Freespire 3 - The release notes page

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The reason why the installer has been tweaked has to do with the ubuntu-restricted-extras package, which provides support for DVD playback, Microsoft fonts, Flash and codecs for common audio and video files. Normally, the package is only installed if you tick the relevant box in the installer. In Freespire the meta-package was installed even though I had opted not to tick the box. This surprised me because a blog post on the PC/OpenSystems website from December 2017 claimed that Freespire 3 would appease what the company refers to as "GNU purists". Apart from some binary blobs in the kernel the distro would be fully libre (and the binary blobs could be removed in a future release).





Freespire 3 - Installing third-party software

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I did check with PC/OpenSystems what Freespire's stance on software freedom is and the company has now released a new ISO (Freespire 3.0.6). In the new version the restricted extras package is never installed - even if you tick the box you will not get the extras package. The checkbox is due to be removed from the installer and the company is apparently working with the Free Software Foundation to make Freespire fully libre.



A final thing worth noting about the installer is that we can set up our partitions as we wish. The release announcement for Freespire and Linspire suggests that file systems such as XFS and Btrfs are only available in Linspire but that is not the case.



While exploring Freespire I quickly discovered that the main difference between stock Xubuntu and Freespire is the look and feel. After changing the theme to Greybird and switching the panel to Xubuntu Modern I was left with Xubuntu. Even the collection of pre-installed software is roughly what you find in Xubuntu (you can compare the packages yourself). The most noteworthy differences are that Freespire comes with three file managers (Thunar, GNOME Files and a program called Worker) and that Thunderbird and LibreOffice are not installed - instead we get the Geary e-mail client and Abiword and Gnumeric for word processing and spreadsheets. Interestingly, Linspire does come with Thunderbird and LibreOffice pre-installed. Silly as it might sound, I suspect the reason why Thunderbird and LibreOffice have been removed in Freespire is that it may encourage people to purchase Linspire.





Freespire 3 - Worker, Thunar and GNOME Files

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There were a few applications I hadn't come across before. In the category Games we get DOSBox, which describes itself as a shell that runs DOS programs; under Accessories we get Midnight Commander and under Settings we find a Domain Blocker, which is a parental control application.





Freespire 3 - Running various desktop utilities

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Freespire does not have its own repositories. The distro does add a Skype repository, even though Skype itself is not installed. The old Click 'N' Run application has been replaced with GNOME Software, while the more advanced Synaptic package manager is also pre-installed.



This is, then, essentially Xubuntu. The only real modifications are in the installer: the link to the release notes has been, let's say, monetised, and if you download the latest ISO the "restricted extras" package will not be installed (even if you tick the relevant box in the installer). Other than that Freespire is Xubuntu 16.04 with a different default theme. If you are an eagle-eyed reader you might have noticed that the link to the installer in the live environment is called "Install Freespire 16.04" - this should of course have been "Install Freespire 3". Selecting "Help" from the application menu opens the documentation for Xubuntu 16.04, complete with Xubuntu branding. In Firefox we get various Ubuntu bookmarks. The name of the Freespire menu icon is xubuntu-logo.png. If you change the software settings so that you are notified of any new version of the distro you will be notified that Ubuntu 17.10 is available. Everywhere you look you see that this is Xubuntu with a few artificial modifications.



Linspire 7 The Linspire ISO is quite a bit larger (2.3GB) and the installation didn't go smoothly. In the live environment I found that the Google Chrome browser failed to launch and the installer appeared to hang. The install window didn't display any information but I could see that the Ubiquity process was running, although it didn't appear to make any progress. After about 40 minutes I decided to reboot the laptop and try again.





Linspire 7.0 - Trying to install the distribution

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The second time both the live environment and installer worked better. I could launch Chrome (although the browser didn't open the link to the release notes) and the installer was working, albeit slowly. The installation took over an hour and at various points the installer appeared to have frozen. At least I got some information about what the installer was trying to do and it did eventually finish.





Linspire 7.0 - The custom installer retrieving files

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Linspire always installs the ubuntu-restricted-package, regardless of whether or not you tick the box to install the codecs and other proprietary goodies. This is in fact one of the main selling points of the distro: PC/OpenSystems has license agreements with Microsoft, Apple, Oracle and (unspecified) other companies that allows the company to include various (unspecified) codecs and the Java stack in its distributions.



Other than the codecs there is, again, nothing that sets the distro apart from Xubuntu. The Linspire release announcement mentions the availability of ZFS as one of the major features but, as I suspected, ZFS was not listed among the usual file systems. It is of course possible to use ZFS on Linspire, simply because it is possible to use ZFS on Ubuntu. However, getting ZFS to work on Linspire is not as easy as selecting it at the partitioning stage. I might add that the release announcement for Freespire and Linspire is misleading in that it suggests that ZFS is not available in Freespire. The fact is that there is no difference between Ubuntu, Freespire and Linspire when it comes to support for ZFS.





Linspire 7.0 - Chrome, Xfce Terminal and Skype

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As I have already mentioned, the software collection in Linspire and Freespire is slightly different. In Linspire, Firefox has been replaced with Google Chrome and instead of Geary you now get Thunderbird (although I couldn't detect the promised Exchange add-on). LibreOffice 5.4 is provided via a PPA and we also get VLC, ClamAV, Bleachbit and VirtualBox. You again get the Skype repository and this time Skype is actually installed as well. In addition, you also get a WINE repository out of the box. Like Freespire, Linspire does not have its own repositories.



Performance, bugs and Xfce



It almost goes without saying that both Freespire and Linspire worked perfectly fine. On both my laptop and in GNOME Boxes the distros were responsive and stable - nothing crashed and I didn't encounter a single bug. Of course, it is Xubuntu that should get the plaudits for that. Freespire and Linspire are stock Xubuntu with a different theme and a slightly different set of default applications. On the topic of bugs and default applications, one reason why I didn't encounter any bugs might be that Apport is not pre-installed in Freespire and Linspire. Apport is Ubuntu's crash reporting tool. It intercepts program crashes, collects debugging information and allows you to send the information to the Ubuntu developers via a graphical interface. As a replacement, Freespire and Linspire have their own "bug reporting tool": users can submit bug reports by leaving a comment on their Blogger blog. To date, not a single bug has been reported.





Linspire 7.0 - Reporting bugs

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As for the Xfce desktop environment, I like the desktop. It is unassuming and fairly customisable. One thing to be aware of in both Freespire and Linspire is that the default panel configuration hasn't been saved. Instead, the developers have simply modified the default theme, which means that you have no way of going back to the default configuration if you change the panel layout.





Freespire 3 - Theme settings

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Other than that the only minor annoyance is that Google Chrome and most GNOME applications stick out like a sore thumb. In Xubuntu the window decorations of GNOME applications have a similar look and feel if you stick with the default Greybird theme, although windows are missing the maximise and close buttons (you only get a minimise button). In Freespire and Linspire GNOME applications use a completely different theme with flat macOS-style buttons. I guess there is no perfect solution to integrating GNOME applications in a non-GNOME desktop environment.



Conclusions



Before I started my trial I was under the impression that Freespire and Linspire were quite different from stock Xubuntu. The Linspire blog, for instance, talks about binary blobs in "our" kernel and proprietary packages provided by vendors to Linspire. As I quickly learned, Linspire doesn't have its own repositories (let alone a custom kernel) and the proprietary packages are provided via the ubuntu-restricted-extras package. Similarly, the lead developer recently wrote on his blog that people who claim that Linspire is just a Xubuntu respin should "mind their own business" because they have no idea how much work has gone into customising Linspire over the last 18 months. When I asked the company if they could give some examples of how Linspire is different from Xubuntu I was told that, actually, their aim is to stay as close to Xubuntu as possible.



It would be unfair, however, to dismiss Freespire and Linspire as Xubuntu clones. The distros have two interesting selling points. Firstly, PC/OpenSystems can legally ship certain patent-encumbered codecs. Of course, anyone can install the ubuntu-restricted-extras package but in some jurisdictions doing so may be illegal. It is probably fair to say that few people care about such legalities but if you prefer to play by the rules then Linspire is worth a look.



Secondly, Linspire's main feature is the support license. You don't pay $79.99 for Xubuntu with a Linspire sticker - you buy a year's worth of support. Linspire might be an attractive option for small businesses and organisations that want to run Linux with a support contract. Similarly, I reckon many home users will like the idea of being able to get professional support for their Linspire box(es). That said, it is disappointing that the only real customisations (as in code changes) are regressions: the installer is far from a finished product. It is also unfortunate that Freespire lacks direction. The new Freespire was presented as an almost fully libre distro, yet the initial release clearly was the exact opposite. Only after pointing this out did PC/OpenSystems quietly release a new ISO.



The main issue I had with the distros was something else though: the marketing/PR/spin. I have already mentioned various examples of dubious claims. I would like to add one more example, just because it nicely illustrates my gripe: the Freespire page claims that, unlike Freespire, Linux Mint is difficult to install. PC/OpenSystems arrived at that conclusion based on its own research: a whopping three people were asked to install Freespire, Ubuntu and Linux Mint and the "sample group" apparently struggled to install Mint.



This type of marketing is needlessly negative. I would rather see the company work with, say, the Trisquel developers, who have already solved the issue with the checkbox in the Ubiquity installer and who may also be able to help Freespire become an FSF-approved distro. I would love to see a proper bug tracking tool so that I would have an easy way to report issues. And I think it would also be nice if PC/OpenSystems would start sharing the code it claims to produce.



In short, I think both Freespire and Linspire are on to something. I like the idea of a fully libre Xubuntu spin and I am sure there is demand for Linspire. I just hope history won't repeat itself. * * * * * Hardware used for this review



My physical test equipment for this review was a Lenovo Thinkpad X220 with the following specifications: Processor: Intel Core i3-2520M, 2.5GHz

Memory: 8GB of RAM

Wireless network adapter: Intel Centrino Advanced-N 6205

Wired network adapter: Intel 82579M * * * * * Visitor supplied rating



Freespire has a visitor supplied average rating of: 6.5/10 from 13 review(s).

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