PGTips91

Yes, I do realise that they are all built on the same foundation.

My problem is that I take askance at the license that Linspire 6.0 comes with and my experience with Freespire left a lot to be desired. I've given up on them.

What I have found with Klikit-Linux, though, is that the underlying OS is easy to get at, learn and tweak. So you have the full Ubuntu experience to draw on if needed. There's not the same corporate brick wall to knock your head against, either.

I'd recommend a look at Klikit-Linux to anyone.

__________________
Paul G. Taylor, Auckland, NZ
LinuxUser_436483 - currently using Klikit-Linux 0.1-8
Lindows Life-time Insider, former life-time member of CNR Warehouse.
Wiki : Reinstalling Linspire Applications

bobd13045

Enjoy. I like playing with different Linux OSs, but the Freespire/Linspire
forum is my forum of choice.

Bob

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Linux Voyager, present port Linspire 6.0.17

Dr.Jones

Linspire is a commercial OS and Freespire is not (2 completely different licenses). There is no difference between Freespire and any other distro that includes licensed commercial software...

__________________
freespire the best of all worlds

Ken@Freespire.org

Freespire Bugzilla

grathganor

Aye it is a much nicer and smaller pool to swim in. Though it is always nice to pop into another forum and see fellow or former spire mates sailing on various linux ships.

__________________
-Patrick


“If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.”– James Madison, Federalist #51.

grathganor

Speaking of which what has the good captain been up to lately?

__________________
-Patrick


“If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.”– James Madison, Federalist #51.

Oponium

IMO, Klikit is crap, especially because Chris, however nice he may be, has a life and can choose to discontinue his project at any time. What happens then? Who knows.

Also, wasn't Klikit intended to be more community-oriented than Freespire? I don't see a difference.

ONE LAST THING <lol>, the last time I went over there the whole community complained about how slow Freespire was going. I DO NOT THINK they have enough room to talk considering Chris releases VERY SLOW, and there isn't much of a difference between releases or between Ubuntu and Klikit (how long has the Klikit storehouse been at the same point for? Exactly, it also has less features, GG)

The only thing that may make Klikit better than Freespire (at this moment), is that it's based on Gutsy Gibbon, and not Feisty Fawn.

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Bro.Tiag

I dona want to speak out of school, but he's been very busy the last time I spoke with him. All non computer related, such as;

School, teaching & attending,
Work,
raising his girls,
working the coffee house,
mentoring youth, (school, church & computers) &
what not.

Cheers

__________________


Since 08 Feb 07

Bligh

For the short term, all I will need is to be able to download current Seamonkey, and possibly an anti-virus app.
Cheers

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Joined 1/15/2003 Lifetime Fr Lifetime Wrld 1500 posts

PGTips91

For which version of Linspire?

Have you thought of compiling from source?

__________________
Paul G. Taylor, Auckland, NZ
LinuxUser_436483 - currently using Klikit-Linux 0.1-8
Lindows Life-time Insider, former life-time member of CNR Warehouse.
Wiki : Reinstalling Linspire Applications

Bligh

5.0.59 has only Lis, 5.1.427 has Lis and and early version of Seamonkey. Both of which are lacking security updates. Seamonkey 1.0.4
Cheers

compiling from source?

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Joined 1/15/2003 Lifetime Fr Lifetime Wrld 1500 posts

subslug

Pardon my ignorance but, weren't you just creating a poll about how much a legacy client of CNR was needed?

I can only imagine how this must make the marketing people's heads spin at Linspire........one minute they aren't supporting enough legacy stuff, next minute they aren't current enough.

I wonder if they were selling machines that printed money what we would find to hold them over the fire for because I assure you, somebody somewhere would be pissed about something.

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::Mike::

Well, if this is my last post in these forums......seeya around.

revhouse1

26 respondents... not bad.

tom

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Oponium

Idno, but I'm all for the "let freespire employees do the work" option.

__________________

Dr.Jones

Who are they ???

__________________
freespire the best of all worlds

Ken@Freespire.org

Freespire Bugzilla

Oponium

Are you suggesting Freespire employees aren't going to do this?

__________________

JDoyle

I thnk he is suggesting that Freespire has no emplyees.

JD

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Freespire Forums Code of Conduct ... Linspire Community Standards

Oponium

I was under the impression that Freespire was developed by volunteers that were payed by Linspire.

__________________

JDoyle

That would make them Linspire employees...
Why Dr.Jones asked "Who are they ???"

JD

__________________


Freespire Forums Code of Conduct ... Linspire Community Standards

Oponium

__________________

Dr.Jones

Correct, Freespire is the Project that Linspire employees develop for...

__________________
freespire the best of all worlds

Ken@Freespire.org

Freespire Bugzilla

PGTips91

I'm sorry for the delay in getting back here. Health and circumstances were adverse.

My take on the situation is : --

1. Lindows 4.5 was the first reasonably good release and in fact a few have never found the need to upgrade it. While the CNR Warehouse existed it could have continued on quite happily on some older systems until they were physically upgraded. At that time it would also make sense to upgrade to a later release or one of the many user-friendly Distos now available.
2. Linspire 5.0 was a very good release. The one thing that was going against it was that there were insufficient updates to applications in the CNR Warehouse and the OS was falling behind the times through lack of support in the repositories. Despite this, many continued to use this as their OS of choice on their production machines.
   
   Again, had the CNR Warehouse continued and been maintained, these users could have continued to use this OS at least until the need to physically upgrade their systems, if not longer.
3. With the 'protection' agreement with Microsoft came a major change in the licence under which Linspire is issued. Rather than the 'Family friendly' licence that appealed so much to the refugees from the MS world, Linspire 6.0 comes with a licence per seat, effectively reducing the value of the OS in a household situation, whether or not there is a need for any special codecs licenced from Microsoft.
4. Finally, since these older OSes are no longer supported by Linspire, users have the choice of either running their installed systems until they break, which could be when there is some physical failure in the system, or maintain the software themselves, for security reasons. Personally I don't see any real need for the latter.

I propose that the project to produce a replacement for the CNR repositories be dropped, due to lack of resources in this community.

Because the underlying systems are Open Source, there is always the possibility to do something to help yourself and share this with the wider community. I suggest that anyone who would like help in helping themselves post a request on this thread. If people in this forum are unable to help, there are lots of other forums dedicated to Open Source and Linux where help can be found, such as : --

Linux Questions http://www.linuxquestions.org/
Debian User Forums http://forums.debian.net/

And other resources such as : --

Beginners: Learn Linux (Linux Reviews) http://linuxreviews.org/beginner/

And, for the rest, Google ...

__________________
Paul G. Taylor, Auckland, NZ
LinuxUser_436483 - currently using Klikit-Linux 0.1-8
Lindows Life-time Insider, former life-time member of CNR Warehouse.
Wiki : Reinstalling Linspire Applications

richard.a

Mate, I echo those remarks.

And Paul,

While I don't have the confidence of my technical ability to install from source, I took advantage of my 24 hours' notice of CNR closing to install to a number of spare 10Gb HDDs several copies of 5.1 and 5.0 and 1.0 and 1.1 with those of the apps I was able to actually download. There was a problem with some of the apps strangely not being in the repository, one example being gparted which I started a thread about, but received no practical help at all.

Maybe I'll use the encouragement I got from some of the folk at PC-BSD and PuppyLinux to try things out for myself in the future.

Someone queried why people have moved on.

There was a point nobody mentioned, and perhaps it would be wise to mention it. I've now seen three times historically people move elsewhere because of what appeared to them - and others - to be a heavy-handedness by those "at the top". No need to say any more.


But an important point in all the several threads on this matter have emphasised the commercial relationship existing between users of Linspire and CNR with the parent company.

While nobody has (yet, afaik) talked in legal terms with the Board of directors, it may still happen. It would be shame if it did, but the scenario is rife in the dog-eat-dog world for such an action for damages to be pursued by someone.

I believe that Linspire Inc should reconsider and do something like Paul suggested, after switching the power back on in ther old CNR server, and giving a decent length of time for people to create backups on spare HDDs that can be used later in the event of a disaster on a running system, having installed every CNR download they believe they may conceivably need in the future, over perhaps a 4-week period.

The company should individually contact every person by email who has entered into such a contractual arrangement to ensure that they cover their bases. I am one of those to whom I refer. I think such action would go a long way towards recovering good will in the community.

Now, I didn't bother to pay for a new subscription at a bargain basement price with a few days of CNR going off-line, like the PR blurb invited me to do. I'm already a lifetime CNR member. Why should I?

It would be very interesting to know if anyone actually did.

Thankyou guys for humouring an old fogie like me. And in particular thanks to Paul for his hard work - I pray the health situation on the home front improves rapidly. I wonder if CNR was deliberately designed to be impossible to implement such a substitute repository scheme - after all CNR as well as Lindows and Linspire have been commercial since they started.

Richard in Adelaide.
.

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Linux User 416434 richard.a Pooh-Bah Joined:13 Sep 2003 Total posts:+1555

PGTips91

Richard, I feel for you and for many like you who are left without support and without the means to easily move forward from here. I think that you are doing remarkably well given that you can give me seven years. I feel old and tired sometimes already!

I know that compiling from source seems a huge obstacle, but, with the support of the community, a well written how-to and a willingness to learn it may just be possible.

Even more possible is that someone with the expertise, can create a .deb file that can easily be downloaded and installed using 'gdebi'. This can become a real community effort.

As an example, I have downloaded Google Picasa from http://dl.google.com/linux/deb/pool/non-free/p/picasa/picasa_2.7.3736-15_i386.deb
and just opening this file triggers 'gdebi 0.2.4ubuntu1' for Fiesty, runs the Package Installer and successfully installed an .exe file running in WINE in my Klikit-Linux 0.1-8 (beta). Now I have had WINE and Win4Lin for years and never been able to install a thing successfully. Yet it was a piece of cake to install this right-up-to-the-minute software. The sense of liberation in Klikit [which is KUbuntu under the hood] is awesome.

One thing that I have done, as a precaution, is to download all the source files for Linspire 4.5 and 5.0.59, so potentially, any one of them can be made available for installation this way.

As I have said, this is one aspect of Open Source that can be a great asset, especially when the expected source of assistance is no longer available, it can be picked up and supported by anyone with the necessary skills - unlike closed source, proprietary software.

I will continue to keep my ear to the ground, here, and anyone wanting further help only needs to ask. Not that I have all the answers, but the community, especially the wider community, does. Do your homework researching first, ask the right questions and be willing to try new things and you will be surprised at what you can do.

Before you know it, you will have outgrown the trainer wheels of CNR and be really in control of you own system!

__________________
Paul G. Taylor, Auckland, NZ
LinuxUser_436483 - currently using Klikit-Linux 0.1-8
Lindows Life-time Insider, former life-time member of CNR Warehouse.
Wiki : Reinstalling Linspire Applications

richard.a

Paul,

I appreciate your remarks, and thank you, as much as anything else, on behalf of those less fortunate than me.

I have the advantage of being brought up on PC-DOS (starting with Version 3.0 when MS Windows was a total joke, Version 2). Ummm maybe it still is, but it at least looks a bit more polished now

I learned how to write and edit the menus in the AutoCAD package (Version 2.something at my original contact with the product) and to write and fix up non-working AutoLISP routines which created useful commands out of the ones provided with the application which were quite puerile really.

AutoLISP is a subfork of the LISP language - the acronym has been humourously described as "more correctly" standing for Lost In Stupid Parentheses

My sortie into PuppyLinux is being fun... I've developed floating command bars based on the Perl version that is part and parcel of Versions 1 and 2 (you can see some of the work I've done here and considerable menu customisation to boot, here which unfortunately only works with earlier versions because of substantial changes to the way PuppyLinux calls menus now.



More fun in the writing up for others to understand a "how to" of creating a Grub bootsplash here and I'm contemplating another on editing the Grub menu. And in creating gzips of the extra files needed in their directories to create the "upgrades" described on those two (and other similar pages).

So, in my case it's not so much being scared stiff (which I grant you is a really valid reaction I'm sure many people who have converted to Lindows/Linspire from MS Windows would feel, akin to a panic attack in some cases I'm sure) but at my stage in life, I ponder why I should need to develop new skills through a time-consuming process. I only use Linspire for sound editing currently, because the version of Audacity I prefer to use was never available anywhere else.

Perhaps I should also mention a warning I gave the puppy community on having a single point repository in view of recent CNR happenings, and I think my comments on this page are quite accurate.

Thanks for the thought my friend. And I have an affection for the product (not necessarily those who make the decisions about it) as once it's running it is a nice solid system.

Richard

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Linux User 416434 richard.a Pooh-Bah Joined:13 Sep 2003 Total posts:+1555

PGTips91

Great post, Richard. I've read your links with interest. You are indeed fortunate to have such experience and skills. It is good to see you sharing your knowledge with the wider community.

I see no reason why installed versions of 'Legacy' Linspire should not continue to be used in the way that you obviously have a need for. They are very stable and inherently secure, so they can just be left to do their thing, as designed.

"If it ain't broke, don't fix it", is a good motto.

By the way, which version of Audacity is it that you are using? There is a way to force keeping to a specific version using Synaptic. I could check to see it your version of Audacity is in the repositories for Ubuntu Fiesty.

Also, Puppy is a great little distro and especially good where a small footprint is needed. For a fuller Distro you might like to have a look at Klikit-Linux which is by far the easiest Linux I have used. There is a CD version of v 0.1-8 somewhere in the forums that is very stable.

Part of the vision for Klikit is the Klikit Storehouse, which is web-based front end to the Ubuntu repositories and additional applications. Still in development yet. You might like to take a look there, too.

Cheers,

Paul

__________________
Paul G. Taylor, Auckland, NZ
LinuxUser_436483 - currently using Klikit-Linux 0.1-8
Lindows Life-time Insider, former life-time member of CNR Warehouse.
Wiki : Reinstalling Linspire Applications

richard.a

My sentiments, entirely

It is a beta version - 1.3.0-beta - over which initially I had a fight with Duane (when he was a staff member), because there were several visual changes in it which I didn't like - but all applications now seem to have them.

BUT.

There was a new command (never seen in the product before or since) called Leveller which I found brilliant, and I use it a great deal on my weekly creating of a series of smaller files I convert to mp3 format from several gigs of .wav exported to me from a Cu Base Windows application via a 4Gb Imation USB "plug" from the sound console at church... the sound man and I evolved this concept jointly. He doesn't ride the levels in his record to HDD mode, leaving it to me to "fix"... being digital there's no "extra" noise introduced through post-production amplification. He concentrates on looking after the front-of-house sound levels and quality - which is really his job anyway.

The leveller in this version of Audacity, used in conjunction with the Normalise control (which sets the overall level to a constant -3db sound level as well as eliminating any DC offset - a great tool for balancing tracks on a CD you are creating, for example), are time saving to the n-th degree in the use to which I put the product.

I do have that version on 3 seperate plug-in rack HDDs for my work-horse machine, on three LOS systems... 5.0.59, 5.1.427 and Freespire 1.0.13 ... and this reinforces the point you make firther up...

Purists among sound engineers do not like to automate a constant level (which is perhaps why it disappeared after that beta), but here we are talking about speech and it's great for that purpose. Lends itself to dramatics and all sorts of stuff. I remember when I worked in commercial broadcasting in the late 1960s, there were always two proprietary rackmounted boxes in the studio feed to the transmitter, one called a "Symmetra-peak" which fixed unbalanced excursions above and below the base-line, and the other ("Audimax") which performed a similar role to the Leveller, but with an unique compression algorithm that was their patent, didn't sound compressed (if used properly).

The main reason I'm interested in Puppy currently is to employ quite ancient and donated free of charge boxes with minimal RAM, slow processors, and small HDDs, which probably will work for another 10 years - or more.

They will run small footprint OS's like Puppy extremely well (and fast) and they will become small clusters of workstations doing email, surfing, and documentation jobs in cybercafes. Currently working on such an installation in an old peoples' facility, probably just two seats.

It's a nice product. I tested a couple of his alphas, but I felt having to burn to DVDs (with their attendant propensity to damage) was not a "plus" for them. And I was looking at Puppy at the same time and felt that would be more useful to the cyber cafe concept.

Thanks anyway mate. Appreciate your thoughts. And I may develop a sorta look-alike to the Linspire Mini-Launchpad for the old peoples' installation I mentioned...

I hadn't ever seen it before I downloaded the CNR stuff a few weeks ago. Great idea for people who don't want or need to browse through menus!

Richard

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Linux User 416434 richard.a Pooh-Bah Joined:13 Sep 2003 Total posts:+1555

Bob3

I found that 6.0.17 on my laptops no longer supports the Cisco Aironet 340 & 350 wireless cards... it used to be that new releases (of 4 & 5) would lag for a while & a month or 3 down the road would start supporting the cards.
Not so with Linspire 6.0.17, I'm going to have to regress if I want to still keep using the old powerhouse cards that have 2x - 3x the range of "newer" wireless cards.
I missed out on the poll, by the way. I was still running Lindows on my email backup machine that I want to keep archived emails accessable.
That one can probably go without CnR though, but I would still expect to see all my customers with 5.0.xx still have access to the programs they shelled out good $$ for.

__________________

PGTips91

Hi Bob3
Lindows Lifer #9
Builder - Reseller - LRaiser

That's an impressive sig!

Yeah, the poll is not representative, merely a slight indication of the measure of need, really. Thank you for posting any way.

This is a good news/ bad news situation as far as I am concerned.

The bad news is that Linspire have pulled their support for CNR Warehouse very suddenly and with insufficient notice for most people to do anything to prepare for that eventuality. Poor PR at the very least.

The good news is that most of the now unsupported systems will keep on much as they already have for some time already with few problems. It's not like another unnamed OS that needs constant maintenance, security updates and rebooting every few days just to keep it running.

Still, I would not like to be in your position of having supplied systems for which there is now no official support.

I don't know how far you have come with your knowledge of Linux, but it is very easy to back up a partition to a compressed image file and that would be one of the first options for data and system protection that users can take, now. It should be possible to restore to a new hard drive and continue to use as before in just a few minutes.

Beyond that, I am still hoping that some community support will develop to assist the remaining users to maintain their systems to full term.

Cheers,

__________________
Paul G. Taylor, Auckland, NZ
LinuxUser_436483 - currently using Klikit-Linux 0.1-8
Lindows Life-time Insider, former life-time member of CNR Warehouse.
Wiki : Reinstalling Linspire Applications

JDoyle

Just curious, how much notice would have been 'sufficient'?

JD

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Freespire Forums Code of Conduct ... Linspire Community Standards

Bligh

I have managed to trash my 5.0.59 laptop, by spilling water into the keyboard. It is working with an external keyboard at the moment. A few files seem to have gotten tweaked in the process. Lis was set to auto start, but will not start from the sys tray or the desktop icon. After disconnecting the internal keyboard it seems to be stable. Would be nice to be able to re-install.
Cheers

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