Look and Feel - KDE and Other Window Managers

If you want to modify the way your system looks and feels (wallpaper and stuff) you'll be using KDE. It's easy and there are tons of things you can do, even to the point of making your system look just like Windows 2000. KDE is a Window Manager, just like Gnome or others for Linux that you may have heard about. Unlike with Windows, you don't have to download some special program to change everything ... it's all at your fingertips!

Comparison to Other Distros

To minimize some of the confusion of Linux, there's a great website out there called "DistroWatch". As of the writing of this article, Linspire was ranked (flat - meaning no growth at the moment) at #25. While Ubuntu, SUSE, and Fedora maintain the top three, there are a lot of distros and it's really all up to your needs.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Linux_distributions

This system is built upon the Debian core. It feels ok on the surface, however after firing up an xterm session and typing a few natural commands, I felt a little let down. I expected to find functions like "man", which opens up a Linux/Unix manual page. However, Standard linux commands function as I expected.

Issuing a "top" command to monitor basic system processes yielded an idle usage of about 4.0% cpu whilst doing nothing at all on the machine. The "cnrwarehouse" process seems to lounge around more than I'd like.

Naturally, the question arose as to whether or not I could download and install (natively) a Linux application. For this task, being a Web Developer, I selected Webmin, a nice application that allows you to completely control your Linux box through a web-based interface. I selected a "tar" formated file (meaning, originally, "tape archive" ... now meaningless really).

I chose to do this the "easy way" by running a shell script (the equivalent in Windows being a batch file or cmd file).


I had some serious problems with the naming scheme set up by Linspire. In particular we don't use spaces to separate filenames in Unix/Linux. This makes using a shell complicated and I couldn't get into the "My Computer" directory at all and ended up having to move the untarred files to a different directory.

Fortunately, most of the important stuff (perl) was in place and the install showed that this was using a 2.6 Linux kernel.

The good news ... Webmin installed without fail proving to me that a more advanced user could get around without the need for CNR. This means that Linspire will function pretty much like any Linux distro; good news to more advanced Linux users who still want the benefits of an easy-to-use system.

Networking with Windows Machines

I've messed around with Samba and other networking utilities in other Linux distros and am pretty impressed with this. I clicked the "Network Share Manager" and discovered that I could view my entire home network. Other Linux experts may scoff at me for saying this, but I have to say that I did absolutely no configuration.

It did ask me for my Windows logins for those machines, but it worked without fail.

Going the other way, however, was more complicated. I tried giving universal write privs, but still couldn't transfer a file back the other way easily. This is typical and usually requires a bit more attention. Samba isn't the easiest thing in the world (try the dance too ... whew!).

As regards networking with other machines in your home environment, I give big props to Linspire for making it a cakewalk!

Pricing

Serving my time as a Customer Support person for a few years supporting users on Linux, I came to truly understand the quote:


Linspire is a middle ground. It isn't free, but then Windows is really is prohibitively expensive in my opinion. Don't get me wrong ... Windows is the de facto standard in the world.

For about $50, we're talking the cost of a good game like Q4 or HL2. It's reasonable, particularly for customer support.

My only concern here is that after purchasing Linspire itself, you are encouraged to get CNR too, effectively raising the pricetag. Even still, we're way beneath the threshhold of Windows, friends. To compare, a purchase of Windows Pro and Office is roughly $500, while buying Linspire and CNR Gold for a year comes to just under $100. Heck of a deal, when you do the math! Honestly, if you add Cedega for another $60, you could potentially completely replace your Windows OS.

Big Points ... transferring the hard disk from one machine to another!

I've done a LOT of Linux installs, but have to say that I'm clearly impressed by one feature. I pulled the hard drive out of one machine and put it in an entirely different machine. In my experience, most machines do more than complain, they simply don't work! In this case, however, there were some command-line level complaints (highlighted in orange or red) but the system reconciled itself and worked fine.

Other Stuff You Might Want

Unlike Windows, the Linux world offers most everything for free. The old rule saying, "There ain't no such thing as a free lunch" is still true. Some tools you download may work out of the box, while others may not and suck down hours of your time to fix.

Still, there are scads of applications to do anything you want to do. Want to manage your music ... done! Want to bittorrent? Cake! You name it, someone has probably developed a program for it that's generally free.

What's not free, however, is support for Windows apps. Thing that are extremely cool are apps like "Crossover Office" (listing about $40) that allows you to use Microsoft Office on your Linux box. Cooler things are in development like Cedega. At $60, it's a little pricey but does catch my interest:

"Cedega can run hundreds of top tier titles on Linux, including blockbuster hits such as BattleField 2, World of WarCraft, Dungeon Siege 2, Madden 2006, Half Life 2, City of Villains, WarCraft III and Star Wars Galaxies, just to name a few." This will have to be reviewed in a later piece.

Remember this ... quality applications cost money. I've supported customers on high-end applications (with a really hefty pricetag) and you get what you pay for. In the Linux world, there's a lot of good free stuff out there, but you still have to pay for quality applications.