Linspire/Freespire

Linspire, Inc., was founded in 2001 by Michael Robertson. It was originally called Lindows, to indicate to potential users that its software was a Windows-like version of Linux. The company and the distribution changed their name in 2004 to settle a trademark infringement lawsuit by Microsoft. In 2007 Linspire signed a licensing and patent agreement with Microsoft similar to the ones inked by Microsoft with Novell and Xandros.

Lindows version 1.0 was released in 2001. The current Linspire release is 6.0.

Freespire has the same relationship with Linspire as Fedora does with Red Hat, or openSUSE with SUSE. It's more community-oriented. Freespire is available in versions with and without closed source libraries. Version 1.0 was released in 2006. The current release is 2.0.

Linspire, Inc. was founded in 2001 to bring choice into the operating system market. The company's flagship product, the Linspire operating system, is an affordable, easy-to-use Linux-based operating system distributed primarily pre-installed on PCs for home, school, and business users. Linspire pioneered the CNR Technology, which allows desktop Linux users access to thousands of software programs, packages and libraries, each of which can be downloaded and installed with just one mouse click. Linspire, Inc. was founded by former MP3.com CEO Michael Robertson. Linspire is headquartered in San Diego, CA.

The latest operating system offering from Linspire is compatible with all popular operating system, Internet and media file extensions. You can open, edit and share files including Word (.doc), Excel (.xls), PowerPoint (.ppt), Real Player (.ram, .rm), audio files (.wav, .mp3), graphics files (.psd, .jpg, .gif, .tif, .bmp, .pdf, etc.), and many more.

Read more about Linspire's operating system on our reviews page or purchase Linspire here.