Last week there were several articles published about the release of Freespire. A few years back I had given Winspire, now Linspire, a try and dropped it like a hot rock because of difficulty installing it and then getting it to work. It just wasn’t worth the effort. So I thought I would give Freespire a whirl and see how, or if, it was improved since that earlier experience. After all, it has been about five years. Here’s what happened.

I downloaded the iso of Freespire without incident. In fact the download went really quickly, didn’t stall or have any other kind of tantrums. K3b burned a nice disk first try and I was set to go. Three computers were involved in this test: a 5 year old Compaq Presario 5000, a two year old HP Pavilion ze4904 and a one year old Compaq Presario SR1475CL with an AMD64 Athlon processor. All testing was done with the live CD—no installing of the Freespire, which turned out to be a good thing. All three of these machines have lots of memory installed. The 5000 has a gigabyte as does the SR1475CL. The laptop has 756 Megabytes so there is no shortage of memory available.

The old Compaq Presario 5000 happily booted up with the live CD, although it took three minutes to do so. Everything appeared to work fine, sound and video had no problems and the connection to the internet went smoothly and automatically. Setting up the printer was a snap. Freespire uses the excellent KDE Printer Wizard and it works great. Good start but it was downhill from there. Everything ran very slowly, so slowly in fact that I thought Firefox had locked up. Nope. Freespire just had to chew on it for a while. It is expected that a live CD will run more slowly than an installed version but this was like molasses in January. The assortment of programs that comes with Freespire is adequate, but not marvelous. There are many programs available from Freespire though, for a price, so if you need something not included you can probably get it in an easy install package.

Hardly anything to say about the live CD on the HP laptop. It was not possible to test it because, although the desktop came up as expected (three minutes and fifteen seconds, however) there was “no sound device” detected and the keyboard promptly locked up and the only way to regain control was to use the power switch to shut down. This happened three times so it was no fluke.

Sort of the same result with the Presario SR1475CL. I wasn’t really expecting that Freespire would be compatible with the AMD64 Athlon processor but the desktop came up as expected, after three mintes and twenty seconds, with “no sound device” detected and no internet connection established. Then the keyboard locked up, as with the HP laptop, and I had to resort to the power switch.

So, what’s the conclusion? I certainly can’t suggest that you try Freespire on the basis of the results on these three machines. If you are determined to give it a try then get a live CD by downloading or purchase and give it a thorough try before you install it to your hard drive. But you know what? You’d be a lot better off to get Ubuntu, PCLinuxOS .93 Junior or MEPIS. Get Live CD’s of them and compare them to Freespire.

And don’t judge linux by Freespire.