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Linspire, the distribution originally launched as Lindows, is no more, says Xandros CEO Andreas Typaldos.

Xandros purchased Linspire, the company, earlier this summer. This week, the company announced that it was going to revamp community distribution Freespire, basing its next version on Debian instead of Ubuntu, and using it as a precursor for Xandros Desktop Professional, in much the same way Red Hat uses Fedora and SUSE uses openSUSE. But the company didn't need multiple for-pay desktop distributions, so Linspire is getting the boot.

"A principal advantage of Linspire, its codec licensing agreement with Microsoft, no longer applies," Typaldos says. "With the Linspire acquisition we had three desktop brands and two distinct code bases. From joint discussions with our respective engineering teams it made eminent sense to combine our efforts with a single code base and two brands.

"Freespire is returning to Debian because we need to build all of our desktop products upon a single code base," Typaldos says. "Xandros has always worked closely with the Debian community where the emphasis is stability and consistency over the bleeding edge. Besides, it's not that big a switch since Ubuntu is based on Debian as well."

Both Xandros Desktop Professional and Freespire will be built on a Debian "Lenny" code base. Typaldos says that some familiar elements from Linspire, such as the CNR client, will probably show up in Xandros.

Linspire, originally known as Lindows, was the Linux distribution that took on Windows with its "choice is good" motto and too-close-for-comfort moniker, which brought Microsoft attorneys running and prompted the change to Linspire. Founder Michael Robertson also attracted the scrutiny by the Free Software Foundation by playing fast and loose with GPL licensing terms. Lindows' main claim to fame was its status as the first pre-installed Linux to be sold in Wal-Mart, or any other major US retail establishment.

greggh wrote:

Linspire, the distribution originally launched as Lindows, is no more, says Xandros CEO Andreas Typaldos.

greggh wrote:Freespire will be to Xandros what Fedora is to Redhat. It seems more and more distros that were based on Ubuntu are moving back to Debian. Lately you hardly ever hear of a Debian based distro moving to Ubuntu like what was happening 1-2 years ago. The pendulum swings back to Debian.

Gomer_X wrote: That's because Debian is the best.

allix wrote:yep , they have not gone for a yum based distro
joking aside, yum is not a bad package manager.

Gomer_X wrote:

allix wrote:yep , they have not gone for a yum based distro
joking aside, yum is not a bad package manager.

Yum is not really a package manager. It's a shell around RPM that does dependency resolution.

There are bad dpkg shells on Debian too. I keep hearing horror stories about adept, and synaptic has some problems. None of them are as slow and frustrating as Yum + Pirut, though.

Tsuroerusu wrote:

Gomer_X wrote:None of them are as slow and frustrating as Yum + Pirut, though.

What version of yum did you last try? The one in Fedora 8 and 9 have been really good for me. Also, for GUI package management, you should give PackageKit a serious look, it's in Fedora 9, I really like that, much better than Pirut.

Gomer_X wrote:

Tsuroerusu wrote:

Gomer_X wrote:None of them are as slow and frustrating as Yum + Pirut, though.

What version of yum did you last try? The one in Fedora 8 and 9 have been really good for me. Also, for GUI package management, you should give PackageKit a serious look, it's in Fedora 9, I really like that, much better than Pirut.

Go back and read what I wrote again. I've never had a problem with Yum. It's slower than aptitude, but functional and full featured.

Gomer_X wrote:The combination of Yum and Pirut is unbearable. It hangs forever, rarely updates the screen so you can't tell if it's working and gives minimal feedback as to what it's doing. It's just plain crap. Thank God it's gone in Fedora 9