Linspire 5.0 is out, and it's taking a bit of inspiration from another commercial operating system—Mac OS X.
Version 5.0 has a lot of new features, including a new look and feel, the 2.6.10 kernel, KDE 3.3, Reiser 4 file system, x.org 6.8.2, 802.11g wireless support, new AOL dialer, enhanced firewall, BitTorrent support, and a VPN wizard among other things.
Also included are a couple of new apps modeled somewhat after Apple's iLife: Lsongs music manager and the Lphoto photo manager. Linspire also comes bundled with OpenOffice 1.1.3 and a new tutorial player designed to make learning about Linspire easy and fast
Screenshot:
The Linspire desktop is well organized and has everything you need to get started using the operating system, including the usual My Computer, browser, email, and printer icons.
You'll also find a helpful "How to Tutorial" icon. This icon launches the tutorial player that comes with Linspire 5.0. We found the tutorials helpful but we did not like the color of the text. Green text is never easy to read and we feel strongly that the next release of Linspire should include a tutorial system that is easier on the eyes.
Linspire includes the usual programs for web browsing (a customized version of Mozilla), office suite (OpenOffice), instant messaging (customized version of GAIM), RealPlayer, Nvu (for creating web sites), and a number of other programs. There is a healthy but not overwhelming amount of software included with Linspire 5.0.
Linspire comes bundled with the ability to view QuickTime, Windows Media, Flash, and other media types. We were able to view movie trailers without doing anything other than clicking on the trailer and choosing our media type. Just for the heck of it, we picked Windows Media and the movie trailer played perfectly with no problems whatsoever.
Of particular interest in this release are Lphoto and Lsongs. These two apps reminded us of Apple's excellent iLife applications for OS X. Although not quite as slick as what Apple is offering, Lphoto and Lsongs definitely add value to Linspire. They provide solid functionality for handling photo albums and music on your Linspire system.
Lphoto lets you organize photos into albums, view slide shows, burn photos to CD, reduce red eye, and lots of other things. New features in Lphoto include better export options, a new web-page-templating system and the ability to import the same image multiple times into different albums.
Lsongs is quite similar to Apple's iTunes application. You can organize your song collection in the Media Library, listen to audio streams in the Stations section (unlike Apple's iTunes you will need to download a separate player application and you will need to use SHOUTcast), and buy music online via MP3Tunes in the Music Store area.
Linspire also includes Ltorrent (a BitTorrent client). We aren't much for file sharing but we were glad that Ltorrent was included. You never know when it might come in handy.
For more screen shots and a detailed review visit
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/...1787948,00.asp
Linspire 5.0 ( Formerlly Lindows)
Linear Mode
