| Freespire floats first Ubuntu-based alpha |
Mar. 09, 2007
 After the recent switch to the Ubuntu code base, Freespire announced that it has restarted its development process with the first alpha release of Freespire 2.0, Alpha1U (1.2.42). The new revision sports a 2.6.20 kernel and the KDE 3.5.6 desktop environment, according to the project team.
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Freespire is the freely downloadable version of Linspire Linux. According to the release announcement, the alpha edition of Freespire v2.0 is strictly intended for testing and bug-fixing purposes. It is definitely not intended to be used in a production environment at this point, the team strongly cautioned.
A strong point of Freespire is that it provides users the choice of including proprietary codecs, drivers, and applications as they see fit. As cited on the project's website, Freespire is sponsored by Linspire, a commercial, desktop-oriented distribution based on Debian GNU/Linux and Ubuntu.
Key new features of the Freespire v2.0 Alpha1U release are said to include:- X.Org 7.2 window manager
- GAIM 2.0.0beta6 messenger
- MPlayer 1.0rc1 media player
- Thunderbird 2.0.0.1 email client
- Samba, Python, Perl and QT-X11 development environments
Users should know that many Freespire-specific features have yet to be implemented, the release team noted. Also, no upgrade path is available from Freespire 1.0 or previous Freespire 2.0 alphas; the automatic boot menu management does not always work; and any applications that do not use ALSA (Advanced Linux Sound Architecture) may not work properly with this latest release.
Freespire urges anyone attempting to use Freespire 2.0 Alpha1U to read all of the associated release notes to avoid any danger to their systems.
You can freely download the live 635 MB ISO image from the main Freespire site, here. Alternately, you can download the ISO image directly from this URL. If you prefer to use BitTorrent for downloads, you may wish to obtain Freespire Alpha1U here.
Screen shots are available for viewing here, courtesy of LinuxQuestions.org.
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