Free Agent: The Latest Free Linux (PC World)

[Posted September 27, 2006 by corbet]

PC World reviews the Freespire distribution. "But unfortunately, nothing in the Freespire package will entice me to abandon Ubuntu Linux--nor do I find anything in Freespire that will make it rise above Fedora or openSUSE in the scrum of free Linuxes. Nothing about Freespire 1.0 is particularly deficient (and as far as I could tell, nothing major is broken), but it has a lot of growing to do before it truly sets itself apart from its competition."

to post comments

Free Agent: The Latest Free Linux (PC World)

Posted Sep 27, 2006 16:22 UTC (Wed) by horen (guest, #2514) [Link] (3 responses)

As I wrote previously, during the installation process, Freespire changed the partition type from ext3 to ReiserFS, without any hint that it was doing so, let alone asking me if I wanted it to.

Their bad, and a big one, IMNSFHO.

I'm sticking with Debian Etch, now that the GUI-based installer is running (and well, too).

YMMV.

Free Agent: The Latest Free Linux (PC World)

Posted Sep 27, 2006 18:58 UTC (Wed) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link] (2 responses)

Partition type? To me this usually means the flag in the partition table, for example 0x06 for FAT16 and 0x07 for HPFS/NTFS. My understanding is ext2, ext3, and Reiser all use 0x83.

Do you mean it simply set the system up with a filesystem other than the one you explicitly selected? That's pretty impressive.

Free Agent: The Latest Free Linux (PC World)

Posted Sep 27, 2006 19:14 UTC (Wed) by horen (guest, #2514) [Link] (1 responses)

"Do you mean it simply set the system up with a filesystem other than the one you explicitly selected? That's pretty impressive."

I had an already-partitioned 40GB drive in my laptop: 1GB swap, 8GB OS, and the rest for my home directory, builds, etc. (mounted on /usr/local). Swap was, of course 0x82, and the others 0x83.

I like journalled filesystems, so when I ran mke2fs on the 0x83 partitions, I did so with the "-j" flag, making them ext3, rather than the default ext2.

But I don't know "jack" about ReiserFS, and had no intention of changing horses mid-stream. Irksome, and more than a little bit Micro$oft-ish. But the look-and-feel of Freespire is very good.

Free Agent: The Latest Free Linux (PC World)

Posted Sep 28, 2006 4:16 UTC (Thu) by AJWM (guest, #15888) [Link]

> But I don't know "jack" about ReiserFS, and had no intention of changing horses mid-stream.

Ditto. SUSE defaults to Reiser but I always change it to ext3 when doing an install. At least it listens to me.

Having once repaired by hand a Unix filesystem that I'd done something colossally stupid to, (fortunately it was only a 10MB drive, this was a long time ago) I like the idea of at least having a chance at understanding how the FS has layed the bits out on the drive.