Post by Admin on Mar 11, 2018 7:09:40 GMT
Linspire 7 SP1 will be delayed until April 8th, 2018 because of so many structural changes and we are working on Linspire certifications for the KDE release. But it is coming and extra time to test is not a bad thing. We have made the following changes to ALL the 'spire distributions that we feel are important but first I want to address some concerns and comments that we have received from some users.
Linspire is a "broken" Ubuntu respin, that is patently false. We have received very few complaints about the distro being broken out of hundreds of consumer users and many enterprise users. We have gotten very few overnight calls about something going wrong. Now we have addressed an issue that some people have had when trying to install the distro from grub. Right now you have to boot into the live desktop to initiate an install and successfully complete. We think we have tracked down that issue to the .config settings in the root directory but we are testing our fixes to make sure the grub install works. Many of our Black Lab customers have said it works now.
The Installer, yes we use the Ubiquity installer. Once again, we do realize that Ubiquity itself has bugs and for Freespire 4 and Linspire 8 we are working on a new installer. Now some people have complained that the KDE installer says "Kubuntu" and that the XFCE installer says "Ubuntu" in some places. To me its not a big deal. Its an installer. You see it once. Do I like it? No. But Im not going to put my people on rewriting Ubiquity from scratch when we are working on a new installer anyway. Personally I think its a silly argument but it is what it is.
Build process, some people have shown some annoyance that we use PinguyBuilder to build the image. PinguyBuilder is derived from Black Lab Image Creator, which we wrote, based on Remastersys. Now we allowed the PinguyOS team to modify it because they added things like Secureboot support where before we had to build the Image and add the secureboot stuff afterwards so they made it easier. But its just a script that allows the build process to speed up otherwise it would take me hours to type in all the commands to build the image. But the image build process is the same that the Manjaro, Red Hat, SUSE, Debian and Ubuntu people have to do as well. Its a tedious process otherwise so its just an avenue for us to speed up the building portion.
Now, as for the official changes that we are making:
KDE and XFCE are the ONLY two builds that we are making. They got the highest amount of votes in our poll.
App Grid replaces GNOME Software and Discover, we are doing this because we feel App Grid is a much better solution. It is faster and has a higher success rate. App Grid is also the "app store" we are using their source code to build the new Click-N-Run as we can use it to add plugins and other infrastructure changes
Freespire will use dark themes and Linspire will use light themes. This is more or less to differentiate the two.
Linspire CE is now KDE only. We made this change because some of the many machines this distribution is meant to work with are Chromebooks and KDE supports the Chromebooks native functions better than XFCE
Clang is now installed alongside GCC, many software products now build with Clang over the GCC suite.
PowerShell will be included with Linspire. Many system admins use Linspire as their primary desktops and they also use Windows Servers. This is a solution that will make their jobs easier. Bash will remain the default. People who dont want PowerShell can remove it via Synaptic which is included in all flavors.
Thanks
Linspire is a "broken" Ubuntu respin, that is patently false. We have received very few complaints about the distro being broken out of hundreds of consumer users and many enterprise users. We have gotten very few overnight calls about something going wrong. Now we have addressed an issue that some people have had when trying to install the distro from grub. Right now you have to boot into the live desktop to initiate an install and successfully complete. We think we have tracked down that issue to the .config settings in the root directory but we are testing our fixes to make sure the grub install works. Many of our Black Lab customers have said it works now.
The Installer, yes we use the Ubiquity installer. Once again, we do realize that Ubiquity itself has bugs and for Freespire 4 and Linspire 8 we are working on a new installer. Now some people have complained that the KDE installer says "Kubuntu" and that the XFCE installer says "Ubuntu" in some places. To me its not a big deal. Its an installer. You see it once. Do I like it? No. But Im not going to put my people on rewriting Ubiquity from scratch when we are working on a new installer anyway. Personally I think its a silly argument but it is what it is.
Build process, some people have shown some annoyance that we use PinguyBuilder to build the image. PinguyBuilder is derived from Black Lab Image Creator, which we wrote, based on Remastersys. Now we allowed the PinguyOS team to modify it because they added things like Secureboot support where before we had to build the Image and add the secureboot stuff afterwards so they made it easier. But its just a script that allows the build process to speed up otherwise it would take me hours to type in all the commands to build the image. But the image build process is the same that the Manjaro, Red Hat, SUSE, Debian and Ubuntu people have to do as well. Its a tedious process otherwise so its just an avenue for us to speed up the building portion.
Now, as for the official changes that we are making:
KDE and XFCE are the ONLY two builds that we are making. They got the highest amount of votes in our poll.
App Grid replaces GNOME Software and Discover, we are doing this because we feel App Grid is a much better solution. It is faster and has a higher success rate. App Grid is also the "app store" we are using their source code to build the new Click-N-Run as we can use it to add plugins and other infrastructure changes
Freespire will use dark themes and Linspire will use light themes. This is more or less to differentiate the two.
Linspire CE is now KDE only. We made this change because some of the many machines this distribution is meant to work with are Chromebooks and KDE supports the Chromebooks native functions better than XFCE
Clang is now installed alongside GCC, many software products now build with Clang over the GCC suite.
PowerShell will be included with Linspire. Many system admins use Linspire as their primary desktops and they also use Windows Servers. This is a solution that will make their jobs easier. Bash will remain the default. People who dont want PowerShell can remove it via Synaptic which is included in all flavors.
Thanks