Reviews – Page 127

Of Bond, the Ashes and the general suckiness of Life

Ok. Just to set the record straight, I’m more British than Indian (atleast, at heart). And therein lie the greatest tragedies of my life.
1. I’m now officially the only person on planet Earth not to have seen Casino Royale till date. Being English at heart (Bond’s English too) and a self proclaimed movie buff, this has to be REALLY bad. And then, the critics going on to say that this is probably the best Bond movie with the best Bond since Connery. Geez…. life’s tough. Heck, to tease me even more, there are those killer trailers with that AWESOME music all over the TV. So, I can’t watch HBO for 2 minutes at a stretch before the trailer comes on to tease me.

As if the Bond debacle isn’t enough, the English cricket team HAS TO put to on the worst bowling performance since the Bradmanesque era. Not just bowling, the batting was at its debacleous best too, wat with Bell being the lone ranger and Pietersen getting a howler of a decision and all the other batsmen surrendering even before one can count to 3. Silver lining? The batting debacle lasted just 62 overs. But, that MAYBE has something to do with the fact that there weren’t any batsmen left after 62 overs to continue the legacy.
The dawn of the second innings brought with it another form of incompetence- the Brits started fielding like nincompoops and gave away 4s where there weren’t even singles.
As if things weren’t bad enough, tomorrow is my phase test at FIIT-JEE and I know as much about Physics, Chemsitry and Maths as an Aztec knew about Blu-ray discs.

Whoever said life’s good, must have bin an infinetly optimistic person. Life sucks.
Well, not big time. The silver lining on my darker than dark cloud is the fact that I’m going to watch The Prestige(that’s the new flick by the Brit director, Christopher Nolan of Memento and Batman Begins fame) on the 2nd(a day after it releases).

Switching over to Freespire 1.0

Name: Freespire 1.0
Made by Linspire
Price: Free
Versions: 1. With proprietary software support 2. OSS edition
Best for: Newbies

Freespire 1.0, by the Linspire group (earlier known as Lindows), officially became my new OS today, after about four months of being on Fedora Core 5 (by the Redhat group). I simply can’t praise it enough. I’d written a whole review on it, but a stupid bug in Google Toolbar made me lose all of it. So I’m just typing a condensed version now. Never shall I ever trust Google Toolbar again. BOOOOOOOO.

The installation took a breezy eight minutes, and didn’t ask for much technical info. What ROCKS though is the interface, which is really cool. I like the Freespire of philosophy of bundling proprietary codecs, drivers etc too, which gives it out-of-the-box capability to handle various media formats and hardware, unlike other Linux distros.

Another much touted thing is its software updater, called CNR (Click n’ Run). Unlike others, it uses a web interface – you even have to sign in. Definitely more choices than Fedora, and almost matches up with Ubuntu‘s Synaptic. Newbies though, may find the reviews and ratings feature helpful for them.

Freespire has also customized versions of many software like Firefox and Thunderbird, and come with new features. Its music management software, Lsongs, too is better than many offerings dished out by others.

What anyone would seriously enjoy about Freespire is its graphics. It’s a KDE-based system, but it has been subtly tweaked by the Freespire designers to mimic Windows more. If they keep going at the same rate, one day they may seriously challenge Mac for its design crown. Makes you forget all about Vista Aero Glass, really.

In all, Freespire is the perfect Linux distro for the new user, while at the same time it comes with the versatility that experienced users demand (its Debian-based), stability (never really had a software hang in Linux; in fact Ctrl+Alt+Del really doesn’t exist in Linux, speaking in MS terms) and security (ever heard on viruses on Linux?). I’d say this is really worth a try, even if you have to buy the CD. Do check out the Freespire website. It performs exceedingly well as the first version of any OS. It remains to be seen though if it ever reaches the cult status of Ubuntu or Fedora.

Experienced users may find it too easy to use though, after years of other distros, but that doesn’t mean Freespire lacks anything.