From: "Rich Gauszka" 

Linspire moving away from Debian

http://desktoplinux.com/news/NS7103672739.html

Canonical Ltd., the sponsor of Ubuntu, and Linspire Inc., the developer of
Linspire and Freespire, on February 8 announced a technology partnership to
integrate with each other's Linux distributions. Linspire/Freespire will be
based on Ubuntu, rather than Debian, and Ubuntu will integrate with
Linspire's CNR package installer/updater.

Starting with Ubuntu's 7.04 release in April, Ubuntu users will gain access
to Linspire's newly opened CNR (Click and Run) e-commerce and software
delivery system. For Linspire, that will mean moving from Debian to Ubuntu
as the base for its Linspire and Freespire desktop operating systems

The Freespire community will start seeing early releases of Freespire 2.0
based on Ubuntu 7.04, aka Feisty Fawn, in the first quarter of 2007, with
the final release expected in the second quarter, following April's
official release of Ubuntu 7.04. The Feisty Fawn distribution is currently
at an alpha 3 release level.

At the same time, Linspire will continue combining proprietary drivers, codecs, and
applications with open-source software by default in Linspire and
Freespire. This controversial approach gives users out-of-the-box support
for a broader range of software, hardware, and multimedia file types than
the Debian or Ubuntu Linuxes baseline distributions do alone.

The new CNR and Ubuntu are both scheduled to make their first appearances
Apr. 19, 2007. For additional information see the Linspire/Ubuntu
partnership FAQ.
http://wiki.freespire.org/index.php/Linspire_Canonical_Partnership_FAQ

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