End of Linspire, Freespire Moving to Debian Base

      by Wyatt Walter

Xandros announced late last week the end of the Linspire distribution. This announcement comes just months after the aquisition of Linspire by Xandros. Linspire originally went by the name of Lindows and has bragged itself up for being the first Linux to be sold at a large US retailer, namely Wal-Mart. Xandros already maintains two other pay-for Linux distributions: Xandros Desktop Professional and Freespire. Xandros has also announced that Freespire will be shifting back to a Debian base rather than the Ubuntu base of late. Xandros CEO Andreas Typaldos says the moves are to reduce the amount of code bases the company needs to support and to bring an emphasis to stability and consistency from the Debian core. Typaldos says also to expect the CNR package management software seen in Linspire to appear in the Xandros and Freespire distributions.

According to the website, you can currently purchase computers with Linspire pre-installed from a large amount of major retailers including Wal-Mart, Buy.com, and Amazon. Although the timing is interesting since the acquisition happened such a short time ago, the changes should allow Xandros to focus more on doing one (or two) thing[s] well rather than having to maintain three different distributions. Xandros seems to be learning a lesson from Novell and Red Hat, using Freespire as its community-based testing and proving grounds for its pay-for, supported Linux distribution.

Filed under Uncategorized : Comments (0) : Aug 12th, 2008