Toying with Linspire

Arch Linux has failed me again. I have tried messing around with Grub boot parameters, modifying fstab, but still no go. Arch just will not boot up with kernel 2.6.

So, I have a PC doing nothing of particular importance. You know what time it is... time to try out another Distro.

Jon has been having such a great time with Linspire, that I thought I'd give it a try. I had a CD from a while back when they were giving them away for free. It was sitting there doing nothing, so I tried it out.

My initial impressions are mixed. There are some things I like and some things I don't like. That install - it's really easy and pretty, but it needs to be a bit... better. It's fine for a user with a single hard drive, but in my case, there are two hard drives: a 16 GB one and a 40 GB one. Unfortunately, the 16 GB one is the IDE drive so I need to install Linspire on that (the other one is connected from a PCI card). What I usually do is install the base system on the smaller drive and make the other one the home directory. However, on Linspire, this is not possible during installation. I chose advanced, but all that allows you to do is pick a particular partition to install it on and toggle installing Grub to the MBR. There isn't even a partitioner, which is really sad. So, I go back and do the auto-install.

The install took about 15 minutes, which isn't bad, but I've installed Mepis in 10.

Most of my issues with Linspire come after the install.

Linspire takes WAY too long to boot. I didn't time it, but it probably takes somewhere around five minutes. Unacceptable. Then it launched LDM (which is probably just KDM with a nice theme) and that took about thirty seconds to give me the login screen. Also unacceptable. Kubuntu took maybe 2 minutes or less to boot up and get to the login screen.

Once I was logged in, it wasn't as bad. But I had another issue. After the first boot, it comes up with initial setup. At one point, it asks you to adjust your soundcard. I didn't hear anything. I moved the slider up and down, still nothing. The speakers were plugged in correctly, I even plugged headphones in... still nothing. I found out later that the sound does work, but it seems unprofessional to have a problem with the initial setup.

My next issue with the setup is at the end of it. On the final screen, there are a bunch of buttons that allow you configure other parts of your system. Hidden among them is "Add Users". That really should be taken care of during the install, and even if they wanted to wait until that initial setup, there should be a whole screen devoted to it. I'd like to quote Michael Robertson here:

I know the hardcore geeks feel differently about [operating as root], that's fine. When somebody installs Linspire, we say "do you want to set up users, yes or no", we give them the choice, right there when they start up for the first time. If they want to set up multiple users, they're welcome to do that, but we don't force them to. That's the difference we have.

He's lying. There's isn't a portion that says "do you want to set up users, yes or no". There is a tiny icon that says "Add Users" that most people aren't likely to click. As Linux gets more popular and eventually may get viruses, running as root is a deathtrap. A virus could run a simple 'rm -rf /' and everything would be gone.

Ok, I got over that in a few moments. I just clicked on, as I probably won't keep Linspire on there.

You all knew this was coming - that damn CNR! Honestly. I'm not going to pay $20 a year to get access to a service that works just as good as apt-get, only with less programs. In the end, $20 isn't that much, but it's the concept I don't like. Charging for access to free software seems pretty cheap to me. And then, if Linspire is the distro that brings people to Linux, what if they raise the prices? You're trapped. They say that you can use apt with Linspire, but I haven't tried this. I assume it works pretty well, but they generally keep that hidden. If you're sitting at a new install of Linspire, they say that you can use CNR to install programs. They don't say, "Or, if you want a free way of installing packages, you can use apt-get instead..." If you're a newbie, you'll have no idea there are any alternatives and will likely shell out money for CNR.

I wanted to install Gizmo, just to see what CNR is about. I went to the Gizmo web site, and clicked on the CNR link. I got a prompt asking me if I wanted to install it. I clicked yes, and nothing happened. I looked in the CNR window, and it had a page informing me that I needed to pay in order to use CNR. So, I went back and downloaded the DEBs, but Gizmo still won't run because Linspire is missing a shared library (libstdc+6, I think). Without apt, I can't use Gizmo.

There were some (actually, five) programs you could install for free in CNR. One of them happened to be Frozen Bubble. I like that game, and used to play it a lot. I installed it. First, I noticed that the downloading was pretty slow. It took way longer than apt would have. But, after it was installed, it worked well.

Then, I wanted to try hibernating. This is the only distro that Jon was able to hibernate in, so I thought I'd give it a whirl. First of all, it was hard to find where to hibernate on a desktop. I eventually found it from KLaptop which was running in the tray (why would KLaptop even be running?) and I was able to hibernate from there. Hibernation actually took a while. I guess this is partially due to the speed of the PC, but I'm pretty sure that another distro would have been faster. Then it came time to resume - I booted back up, it started resuming. It got to 20 Megs, and froze. I left it there for about 10 minutes, but still nothing. Hibernation worked fine in Kubutu, but doesn't work in Linspire. And that's odd, because Kubuntu came with Suspend1, while Linspire came with Suspend2. I will give it that - Linspire is the first distro I have seen to have Suspend2 support out of the box. If only it worked...

I'm going to say it right here - In Linspire, everything else worked. All my hardware was detected and working, all the software I tried worked, etc. But then again - every other distro I've tried on there also worked just as well (and in some cases, better). CNR is a rip-off, and booting takes waaay too long. Maybe I'll give Arch another try, but I also wanted to try the new version of SuSE. We'll see how this unfolds.