A
Review of Linspire Beta 2 - (Continued)
The
Desktop and Menu Structure
As you can see, the default
desktop is clean, generally free
from clutter and pleasing to the eye. Packages added using CNR added
icons to the desktop, which regular users would probably like, but I
prefer a cleaner, icon free desktop.
Entries are also added to the
menu list, corresponding to the general category that they fit in. Of
course, you can opt to just delete the desktop icons that you don't
want, as long as you are sure where they are located in the menu
structure. Veteran Linspire users should have no problem finding
entries in the menu structure. Some users may also like the more
developed "eye candy" interface, which has a professional look, without
being hard on the eyes.
The Konqueror File Manager is very sluggish to respond to clicks, often
leading me to navigate back to click on folders, thinking that I missed
clicking on a desired folder. This is probably due to the complex
internet suite package in Linspire, which noticeably slowed down my
system.
General
Tools and Utilities:
Experienced users of Linux
will usually explore the layout of
command line tools and disk structure right off, getting under the hood
to see what has changed. Of course I did this right off. What I found
was interesting.
All the basic commands are there to explore what is on this version of
Linspire.
Typing in the command uname -r
in the terminal window, revealed that that kernel 2.6.10 was the base
kernel version. What was interesting, is that there are links to kernel
2.6.7 in /usr/src, as well as a build link in /lib/modules to
/usr/src/2.6.10 but no kernel-source installed. Well, of course, this
is a beta build, but installing some packages which look for the
kernel source will be problematic.
X-org version 6.7 is the X windows system installed. Typing in X -version
shows that the build is
kernel 2.6.7, but 2.6.10 i686 is in place.
Moving to the directory /lib/modules, I found modules installed for
wireless cards for the prism, acx based and atheros chipsets, as well
as
pcmcia and yenta support. Wireless tools seem to be installed.
Unfortunately, I don't have any wireless cards in this system, but I
really need to try Linspire in my notebook with an atheros
pcmcia
card in it. For modem users, hsf (softmodem) support seems to
be
present.
Modules loaded at boot time showed support for pcmcia. Filesystem
modules included what would be expected, ext3, fat, vfat, reiserfs and
NTFS (probably with read support only).
In previous versions of Linspire, mount points were located in the
/disks directory, which is now empty. From the desktop, clicking "My
Computer" shows all the partitions on my hard drives, with the
corresponding names of the already installed distros on my system that
Linspire found, including Mandrake, Fedora, vfat partitions, an older
version of Linspire and even a Puppy Linux install on my hard drive.
The
distro installs
that Linspire could not identify had corresponding hd(x) directories,
interestingly, in some cases, more than one instance of each.
A word on wireless networking. It seems that everyone is switching to
wireless these days. I have two boxes with wireless pci cards, one a
Ralink (RT2500) and the other a D-Link Atheros based card. Ndiswrapper
is present in Linspire Beta 2, but I did not have a free card to test
wireless detection in my test box. It looks like Linspire has
drivers built in to use with ndsiwrapper for a variety of wireless
cards, including prism, atheros, RT2400, and broadcom based chips.
However, when I went to the Network Connection Manager to
take a
look at what was available, it failed to start on multiple
attempts to load it.
Modem users appear to have added support, as well. I saw drivers for
hsf and lt based softmodems in /lib/modules. How well they
work,
I do not know, as I use a broadband connection.