Linspire Five-0
Installation:
First off, we would like to thank the kind folks at Linspire for providing us with a CD digital download of Linspire 5.0.59 and access to the CNR Warehouse. In this Linspire Five-0 review we are using the following Linux test machine:
| Hardware Components | |
| Processor: | Intel Pentium 4 2.4C @ 2.55GHz |
| Motherboard: | ASRock P4S55FX+ (655FX+964) |
| Memory: | 512MB Mushkin PC4000 |
| Graphics Card: | Power Color ATI RADEON 9250 |
| Hard Drives: | Hitachi 80GB SATA 7200RPM |
| Optical Drives: | Asus QuieTrack 52x CD-ROM |
| Add-On Devices: | D-Link DGE-530T (10/100/1000) & Zonet ZEN3200 (10/100) & Minitar MN54GPC (802.11g) |
After the 646MB ISO from the digital download was burnt, we then booted the CD. INSTALL or UPDATE Linspire on this computer's hard drive, Run Linspire directly from the CD without installing (LinspireLive!), and ADVANCED Options are the available options when booting from the CD. We proceeded by selecting the first option, INSTALL or UPDATE Linspire on this computer's hard drive. On the initial page of the installer, is simply a brief welcome message along with the different ways to receive Linspire support.
The next screen is selecting the keyboard layout; the available options here are US (American), Portuguese. Spanish, German, Italian, French, Japanese, and Dvorak. After selecting the keyboard layout you then have the option to install or upgrade a previous Linspire installation. If you are taking the route of a new installation, the options for installing are to take over the entire hard disk or an advanced install to specify an installation partition and to create a new MBR (Master Boot Record). Also available via advanced install is the Reiser4 file system, but Reiser3 remains the default system. Unfortunately, at this time the options aren't available with the Linspire installer to resize, remove, or create a new hard disk partition.
The last step of the process that requires user input is to specify the computer name and an administrator/root password. Although, with Linspire an administrator password isn't necessary. After filling out the information, a confirmation screen appears to authenticate the data.
The actual installation process went by extremely fast taking a mere 6 minutes to write all of the data over to the hard drive. During this process, different information windows would rotate above the status bar alerting all of the Linspire features such as Instant Messaging, Hot Words, CNR Service, FREE Internet Calling, etc...
For the visual learners, after the installation process is complete, three graphics appear to show the user how to safely remove the installation CD from the drive and then to reboot their system.