Possible Ubuntu Alternative - Freespire

I haven't had a chance to try it yet, but the following is an excerpt from an email that my brother-in-law sent me. As Windows Vista proves to be a bigger lemon than anyone ever expected, Linux geeks are taking control. The future of non-Windows systems is very promising.

"You may want to check into this, though, if you haven't already: http://www.freespire.org/

Freespire is the free version of Linspire (which used to be Lindows before Microsoft sued them). They started releasing a free version a while back to try to get some more community development going.

I recommend it because they start their codebase with Ubuntu version 7.04 (so underneath the hood, it's completely Ubuntu), but they add in a bunch of really useful stuff.

The most useful of these extra features are the proprietary codecs and drivers. Linspire/Freespire is the only major Linux distribution that comes bundled with support for MP3, WMA, etc, plus a bunch of non-open source drivers for wifi and video cards and other hardware.
They also include a bunch of proprietary software like Flash, Java, Quicktime, and Adobe Acrobat.

The other distributions don't include this stuff because they don't want to pay licensing fees, and because it's not open source software, so if you're a purist, it kind of violate the Linux philosophy.

On my old laptop, I tried half a dozen different distros (Ubuntu, Red Hat, Gentoo, Suse, etc...), and Freespire was the only one that got my wireless card working right out of the box, without fiddling with ndiswrapper or any of that crazy command-line stuff.

Like I said, Linspire/Freespire both contain a bunch of stuff that's not open source, so for somebody who's moving to Linux as a political or philisophical thing, it's probably not a good choice. For somebody who's just looking for solid, free alternative to Windows, it's pretty cool, though."

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