Linspire Five-0

After rebooting and logging in as administrator, the End User License Agreement appears and after giving the confirmation to the EULA, a sound volume controller shows up to select a comfortable default listening level for the audio. Date, time, and time zone information is the next configuration screen to appear. The last configuration window is the advanced settings. The available buttons here are set password, add users, set display resolution, configure dial-up settings, rename the computer, and configure network settings. Most of these available settings are self explanatory, so we will simply go with covering the unique things we discovered from the advanced setting window. When setting the display resolution, options are also available to select the video driver, which in our instance there were two entries for fglrx and also two for ATI, followed by one VESA entry. Later on in this review we will see just how well these display drivers work by default. Also available at the display settings were monitor gamma and power control. Next, we move onto the network settings. After launching the configuration screen for the network, we were quite stunned. Linspire 5.0 had detected all four network interfaces that were connected, including the D-Link DGE-530T and Minitar MN54GPC (Broadcom). When running FedoraCore3 (2.6.9-1.667) previously neither of these devices were detected until we had compiled their respective drivers, but for Linspire it appears these devices work out of the box. Also from this section there are options to configure TCP/IP, Wireless, and Firewall settings. When scanning for wireless networks, Linspire immediately located one of our 802.11g routers, and we were connected.

After closing out on the advanced settings window, the Linspire interactive tutorials window appeared. Taking a cursory look at these tutorials, we found them to be very specific and had covered a number of different topics. These tutorials are also accessible from the Linspire website in a Macromedia Flash format.