Linspire Free Until September 6
If you’ve been waiting to try out Linux, but the price of the more ‘user-friendly’ distributions is putting you off, then you might like to take a look at Linspire Five-0.
Linspire Five-0, formally known as Lindows until big Bill’s lawyers called, is an easy-to-install version of Linux containing a full Internet suite; a complete office suite; digital photo and music managers; advanced notebook and wireless capabilities; and much more. Linspire includes a lot of legal and paid-for 3rd-party licenses for things like mp3, Java, Flash, Quick Time, Windows Media, Bitstream fonts, Real media, music, etc., and this is all pre-loaded, tested and ready to use.
However, the recent release of ‘Freespire’, a private project being worked on by Andrew Betts which used much of the freely available source repository for Linspire got submitted to distrowatch.com as a bona-fide Linux distribution. Andrew found himself confronted with a great deal of confusion surrounding the project, so he quickly changed the name to avoid further misunderstandings. Freespire didn’t have the third party licenses mentioned above and so was in no way a ‘free’ version of Linspire.
Out of the goodness of their hearts, Linspire are offering a truly free version until September 6. “We thought it would be fun”, says the download page which suggests that they need to experience more things that really are fun, but the thought is appreciated nonetheless.
You’d better get a move on though as the offer ends tomorrow and their server is struggling under the weight of all those downloads.
Add comment September 5th, 2005