Freespire 8.0 released

[crosscourt]

Xandros were the ones that bought out Lindows. I loved Xandros as it was easy to use and completely compatible with Windows, It was sold in stores at a very affordable price and was fairly popular in its day.

[wove]

Xandros I believe created Evolution which is generally still Gnome's default PIM.

[crosscourt]

Xandros didnt have anything to do with Evolution as it was originally developed by Novell then went to Ximian. Novell bought Ximian in 2003 and from there on it became popular in many distros.

[wove]

That era of Linux is something of a rabbit hole. I took a trip down it. Ximian developed Evolution as a free open source email client. They also developed an Exchange Server plug in for it which they kept proprietary and sold. Ximian passed the whole mess onto Novell and Novell opensourced the Exchange Server plugin in 2004. Novell passed it onto SUSE, which in 2012 ended their involvement. RedHat picked up the project citing a need for Exchange Server compatibility and that development of Mozilla's Thunderbird was not moving forward.

Xandros was created from the pieces of Corel Linux. The last hurrah for Xandros was being the Linux OS chosen by Asus for the first eeepc Netbook. Xandros and Lindows are now both owned by the same company. Linspire is the Linux that is installed on those all in one touch screen PCs marketed to old people on the back of the Sunday Parade magazine.

[wove]

I found Xandros 3 onlne along with the addons iso, It installed fine in virtmanager. It is a very intersting OS/desktop. It says it is built on Debian and KDE3. It was made to look like a clone of XP. It is hard to actually see what it is built on for although it is mostly KDE applications none seem to include anything to identify which versions they might be.

It comes with decent documentation and a store which is an oddity for 2003. Xandros comes with Crossover, and the store list many applications from MS as well as many Adobe applications, which would be installed via Crossover, all apparently done via one click. It does come with OpenOffice and the "Mozilla Desktop", which is just a strange layout out of the Communicator Suite. The repositories are long dead, so I am not sure what all is available but I imagine apt would install anything Debian.

I have no clue as to how popular it may have been or if using it within an office/business environment would make you full fledged partner. It is an interesting diversion the Linux desktop took in the early oughts. I am pretty sure I would have had no real interest in it at the time and looking back I find it odd that it was ever seen as commercially viable.

[crosscourt]

Will probably reinstall Freespire and see how it goes as I like the distro overall but their forums are really dysfunctional.

[crosscourt]

Reinstalled and so far no problems at all.Its running on my Dell E4310 and resource usage is around 470-500mbs. Very comparable to KDE but not quite as customizable versus KDE.

[tlmiller]

Will probably reinstall Freespire and see how it goes as I like the distro overall but their forums are really dysfunctional.

I wouldn't so much say dysfunctional as...utterly dead.

[crosscourt]

Actually someone responded to my thread over there and thanked me for explaining the Synaptic issue, but the admin seems to be missing. Board design and features are antiquated and not user friendly.

[crosscourt]

LOL! The admin over at the forum responded to my Synaptic thread and his response was use sudo synaptic in terminal. Yep you can do that but it doesnt solve fixing the lack of an icon and no authentication within the GUI. He doesnt look at the forum much as someone changed one of the threads from the admin to read, by cialis online
Another thread is a rant about someone whos a nurse and honestly I have no idea what that has to do with the website. Hes running ProBoards so hes making some money from it but clearly isnt that involved. I reported a lot of posts and posted in a few threads, the most activity theyve seen in over a year.