Linspire is offering the Beta for free, but their Linspire 9.5 costs $39.99?! Dudes ‘n Dudettes!!! Desktop users can buy a Microsoft Windows 10 Pro OEM CD KEY for $17.46 from URcdkey and their Wheel Mouse will actually work.

Well, you probably have a nice commercial market for your product, so get it whilst you can!  😉

And, Linspire does sponsor the free Freespire. Can’t blame these poor developers for trying to make a living at what they do…those ‘Freebie Whackos’ are a useless lot, IMHO.

Downloaded the 1.97GB public-beta-1 disk image file this morning…had heard a little about Linspire, but really didn’t know anything about it. Linspire is a “commercial distribution” and the 10 Public Beta is based on Ubuntu LTS 20.04, but they apparently add ‘n tweak a lot of their own stuff. Definitely a ‘Password Dependent’ Distro.

Tried to create the ‘Live’ installation media with Rufus, but it was a hybrid ISO and I didn’t select the DD format…the ‘Live’ USB didn’t work. balenaEtcher focuses on the DD format so I tried it next and that worked.

No problems after that. Linspire 10 Beta has excellent hardware recognition, but the install took over 10 minutes. However, I had check-the-box for doing the updates ‘n also the Third Party software so maybe that slowed it down. Still, slow for an install to SSD. Glad I got that Third Party software, i.e. it automatically installed Apevia’s GeForce 1660 card’s NVIDIA Driver 455.38…nice ‘n easy!

Only offered the XFCE 4.14 DE for downloading (I don’t care for it), but had read it has the Synaptic Package Manager so had planned on installing the Cinnamon DE. Synaptic Package Manager gets no respect, but it is my favorite Linux package manager, and is probably the best at installing new Desktop Environments (DE). Opened it and ran a search for Cinnamon:

Then selected the “Cinnamon desktop environment – full desktop with extra components” and accepted all the other packages needed – clicked Apply:

Here is the new System info:

OK…much better, though Xfce was OK, but certainly not even my 3th or 4th DE choice.  😉

Linspire 10 Beta had spotted my Pantum P2500W printer ‘n wanted a driver. Beta problems showed up during this, e.g. I couldn’t “cancel” the search it was doing, and had to force stop that. Piddled with it for awhile, then just deleted the P2500W printer, and added a “new” one after extracting ‘n installing the Pantum-Ubuntu-Driver-V1-1-5.tar.gz driver. The “new” one became Pantum-P2500W-series and easily printed out a test page.

I don’t understand some Linux users who would use a Linux Distro that didn’t support a printer. Ubuntu, Ubuntu-based, and apparently Debian, offer a lot of printer drivers from OEMs. I may look for a new Linux supported printer over the next year or so…one that seems to offer drivers for at least the Red Hat groupies, since I use Fedora ‘n CentOS Stream a lot. Fedora ‘n CentOS Stream are Fulltime Linux Root User Distros without the annoying “Authenticate” popup/s or other ‘Pesky Passwords’ required by ‘Password Dependent’ Distros, but they don’t work with my Pantum printer.

Yes, I may buy myself a new Linux printer for Christmas ‘n use it for Linux Distro testing. Problem is, what printer OEM offers from 600-2000+++ printer drivers?! Linus Torvalds calls that a ‘Fragmentation’ problem and OEM’s agree! I’ll look for printers that at least support both Ubuntu ‘n Red Hat…

Linspire has all the dull Debian backgrounds, so I changed that to the only one I did like, which wasn’t dull Debian ‘Looking‘:

The Linspire 10 Public Beta 1 is a great looking “commercial distribution” so final release should be fine.

LINUX IS LIKE A BOX OF CHOCOLATES – you never know what you’re gonna get!

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