First Look at Linspire 5.0 [LWN.net]

March 23, 2005

This article was contributed by Ladislav Bodnar

A new version of Linspire (formerly LindowsOS) was released last week. Unlike the previous versions, which were being produced and marketed at a furious pace, the Linspire developers and beta testers took their time with version 5.0 - it came out exactly 15 months after the distribution's previous stable release - Linspire 4.5. This would indicate that the company's strategy has undergone some changes - there seems to be less emphasis on marketing and hype, and more focus on true usability and feature enhancements to make the product accessible to non-technical users. And indeed, Linspire 5.0 is an excellent, user-friendly distribution with many new features and intriguing enhancements.

The release is available for instant purchase and download from Linspire's online store for $49.95. Current active members of the $5/month Click-N-Run (CNR) application warehouse can get it free of charge - either from one of the company's FTP/HTTP servers, or via BitTorrent. Interestingly, the CD image serves both as an installation medium and a live CD, and users have an opportunity to choose one or the other from the initial GRUB boot menu. GRUB makes its first appearance in Linspire 5.0 and it gives an early indication that the distribution now comes with a brand new installer - a more powerful one than any of the installers in previous versions. Naturally, the ultra-simple "take over the hard disk" installation method is still available, but the "advanced" installation option now lives up to its name; it not only allows users to choose a hard disk partition to install Linspire on, it also gives a choice between ReiserFS (default) and Reiser4 (experimental) file systems. Various boot options can also be configured here. Once done, the installer will simply copy the files from the CD onto the hard disk before prompting the user to reboot the system.

After rebooting we found ourselves looking at a long GRUB menu listing several operating systems (the installer is capable of detecting and setting up other installed operating systems, both Windows and Linux), as well as two other menu items: "Redetect" and "Diagnostics". The former is useful in case a new piece of hardware has been added to the computer, while the latter allows users to boot into a single-user mode for any troubleshooting, and even provides a diagnostics output that can be forwarded to the Linspire support personnel. The default option will boot into "ldm", a graphical login screen with entries for "Administrator", as well as any available user accounts. The only desktop on the Linspire 5.0 installation CD is a heavily beautified and customized KDE 3.3.2.

But underneath the pretty user interface it is still Linux (or Debian GNU/Linux, to be more precise), so what exactly differentiates Linspire from other major Linux distributions on the market? As one would expect from a beginner-friendly operating system, Linspire comes with some exciting usability enhancements. The "Linspire Web Suite" is one of the applications with added functionality compared to the stock Mozilla browser; these include a check-as-you-type spell-checking application (with suggested replacement words), as well as "Hot Words". Hot Words is an interesting technology that auto-highlights words on a web page and brings up a customizable context menu with quick links to search, news, dictionary, thesaurus and other relevant web sites. This feature is turned off by default, but once you get used to the concept, you might find that web browsing is suddenly an altogether different and more pleasant experience. Disappointingly, this feature is not available in Firefox or Konqueror.

Linspire has been developing its own set of applications to overcome some obvious difficulties in adoption of Linux on the desktop. The range of these L* applications now includes Lphoto, Lsongs, Lassist and LTorrent, complemented by a web authoring application called Nvu. Some of these have been nicely integrated into Linspire - as an example, Lphoto detects a digital camera storage device in the USB port and offers to import all images into the application. It also provides the ability to organize images into virtual photo albums, launch a slide show, or email images. Lsongs is a media player and a budding competition to iTunes, with options to buy MP3 music files from MP3tunes.com - a new business venture launched recently by Linspire's founder Michael Robertson. Some of these applications still need work before they mature, but as a general rule, they are easy-to-use and add to the overall desktop usability of Linspire.

As far as Linspire's view of computer security is concerned, not much has changed since earlier releases, and the default state is still "run as passwordless root". That said, a superuser password can be optionally entered during installation and new user accounts can be created from a configuration screen, right after the first boot. I had a lengthy email exchange about these issues with Linspire's president Kevin Carmony. He insisted that enforcement of passwords and user accounts is an annoying and inconvenient "hoop", similar to enforcing strict airport security or placing 12 extra locks on one's house. More interestingly, he also disclosed that Linspire was sponsoring work "at the file system level that will make the OS more secure than it has ever been before, and all without expecting grandma to jump through complicated hoops." And while on the subject of security, it is worth noting that encryption of users' home directories, a concept so nicely implemented in Xandros Desktop OS 3, is not available in Linspire 5.0.

There are many other small ideas that make Linspire 5.0 a truly great operating system for non-technical users. A set of Flash-based audio-visual tutorials guide new users through the very basics of computer usage. File extensions have been properly associated with default applications. Flash, Java, and media playback support are integrated into the default browser. Supermount for removable devices works reliably. The hardware detection and configuration is quite possibly the best in the industry - now also with support for wireless networking, 802.11g, and WiFi profiles. The CNR warehouse, with thousands of Debian packages available at a click of a mouse, nicely compliments the entire package. Even experienced Linux users would surely appreciate all these conveniences that greatly contribute towards more productive use of their computers.

Overall, Linspire gets a top mark for their effort at bringing Linux to the masses. Their latest release is not the fastest operating system on earth, but it is beautiful, well-designed, has excellent hardware support, and many small improvements that make computers so much more fun. Highly recommended - not only to grandmas, but also to users who value their time.

(Log in to post comments)