Linspire Launches Five-0 Desktop Linux

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Get out the kettle drums, the brass horn section, the surf boards, the grass hula skirts, and buy that plane ticket to Hawaii because commercial desktop Linux distributor Linspire has launched Linspire Five-0, it's latest implementation of desktop Linux. Linspire says it has made over 1,200 tweaks to the commercial package to bring it to the Five-0 level and to continue to demonstrate that Linux does indeed have a place on real people's desktops.

While commercial Linux distros Red Hat, Novell, and Mandrakesoft have all developed variants of their workstation and server Linux implementations for normal PC desktops and laptops, San Diego-based Linspire, which was founded in 2001 as Lindows and which fought and won some pretty major battles with Microsoft, has focused exclusively on the consumer Linux PC market. In fact, the company bills its eponymous Linux variant as "the world's easiest desktop Linux. Because of its consumer orientation, Linspire has been able to ink deals with Wal-Mart, Best Buy, CompUSA and others to have its Linspire operating system pre-installed on PCs and laptops that these organizations sell to consumers.

With Linspire Five-0, the company is rolling out a new feature called Total System Update, which can apply patches to the core Linux operating system and any of the 2,000 Linux-based applications that Linspire distributes through its Click 'N Run Warehouse service, which is called CNR. Like Microsoft's Windows Update for its operating system, Total System Update for Linspire Five-0 allows users to apply patches manually after they are downloaded or automatically if they would rather not be bothered with patches.

Linspire Five-0 is based on the Linux 2.6.10 kernel, which is one baby step back from the latest sub-release. Rather than allow users a choice between the KDE or Gnome interfaces, Linspire has standardized on the KDE interface and tweaked it to look a little bit more like the Windows 95 interface that most people think of as a PC. It also uses the Reiser 4 file system and the X.org 6.8.2 video system. Linspire has added in the OpenOffice 1.1.3 office suite, plus an integrated browser (it is unclear which one), email client, instant message client, virtual private network and firewall, and an optional VirusSafe virus-scanning service. The software also includes the Hot Words integrated search for the whole desktop environment and integrated spell checking for all key applications--email, Web browser, and instant messenger.

And because it is aimed at consumer desktops, Linspire Five-0 also has an AOL dialer and support for the Real 10 media player as well as the Lsongs player and Lphoto photo management system. The operating system also supports the PowerNow power management features used in mobile processors from Advanced Micro Devices and the Centrino hybrid Pentium and wireless processors sold by Intel for laptops. The software also has support for Intel's HyperThreading simultaneous multithreading, which boosts the efficiency of processors by adding two virtual threads to a single-threaded processor.

Customers who are using earlier releases of LindowsOS or Linspire can upgrade to Linspire Five-0 without reformating their disks or otherwise mucking with their systems in such a way that they lose settings or data, according to Linspire.

Linspire Five-0 is available immediately by download for $49.95, the same price the company was charging for Linspire 4.5. The company will also be pushing the software through more than 1,000 retail outlets later this month, and if you want to buy one of those shrink-wrapped versions with the CD, you can pre-order it now on the Linspire site for $59.95. If you want to buy the full-tilt-boogie version, which includes the support for Linspire Five-0 as well as a year's subscription to the CNR service, you can buy it online now for $89.95. The retail version of Linspire plus CNR will sell for $99.95. Those customers who want to accept a digital release of the software can spend $99.95, which offers"insider status" and access to forums, chat rooms, pre-release updates, and newsletters from Linspire. The boxed versions of the software will support American English, British English, Spanish, German, French, Italian, and Dutch. The American English version is available now, and the other languages will be supported in the second quarter; it did not say precisely when.