Categories
Reviews

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.

Categories
Personal Reflections

CBSE Heritage India Quiz 2006 Prelims

The prelims of the CBSE Heritage India Quiz 2006 were held at Modern School, Vasant Vihar today. The turnout definitely seemed to be lesser than last year. Maybe that’s because if the ongoing term exams in most schools. Nice way to start off the day though, since I got into trouble for bringing my cellphone along. After much teeth-gritting, kept it with my friend Ishaan who’d to leave his bag outside too. Gotta complain about partiality though – there were others in the centre who’d carried such things in. Came across my old school’s (er, nightmare’s?) team at the centre too, although I didn’t get much time to interact (did I want to really?) since I was trying to figure out a safe haven for my 3220.

The paper this year was tougher than last year’s. Last year’s paper was pretty kiddish, and we’d sailed through then. This year, they’d certainly raised the bar quite a few inches higher. Enough to (horror of horrors!) me, an old salt to be bothered about the team’s performance. In the end, figured out a lot, and did it.

On having discussions with the team members, Varun and Srishti, later on, I was delighted to know that our new members did exceedingly well for new-comers by any standards. Hell, they did well by standards set by old-timers too. We seem to have got a fair number of questions correct. The DPS RKP team too has put in a good performance. Remains to be seen whether we are among the top six who get through, but I’m pretty confident that we should, given the fact that this was a strong team. Fingers crossed still, and can’t definitely say that we’d get through. Ah well, waiting till the results then…]

Good thing though that my math exam got postponed to 3rd October, although I’m not sure what I’ll do even then because I haven’t quite a few classes on the topics which are coming. Really gutsy though that one of the members didn’t take the postponement – never heard that happen in the quizzing community. Oh, they’ll learn to grab such opportunities more eagerly later I’m sure, when they start getting deeper into quizzing (and missing more classes / fooling off at home). 😉