Distro Update: Freevo Live
Note: I am away right now, so I cannot cover the daily news, but I want to continue daily content on this site. This article was written in advance and published automatically. Daily news will resume in a few days, or sooner, if I am able to get online while I am away.
Freevo Live, currently at version .15, is based on the Freevo “home theater platform.” Basically this means you get access to Music, Videos, Movie Trailers, Photos, and that kind of stuff, as well as a web browser. The interface is overall quite nice, but I did notice quite a few glitches here and there. For example, from the live CD, I cannot shutdown. Another annoying issue, though perhaps not a bug, is that you can only navigate down the menus and then if you go to the wrong menu you have to hit the home key, which takes you to the top of the menu tree. I could just be missing the button to go back, but something like that really should be intuitive.
Another thing that really bugs me is that the whole Freevo Live experience is a very simple select the menu you want and hit enter sort of thing, but when you go into the web browser, all that goes away and you just get a default web browser with nothing to make it look like the rest of Freevo Live and nothing to make it easier to control from the couch, unless I missed something. Despite these complaints, having a web browser in a home theater distro is really cool.
Unfortunately, the future of Freevo does not appear to have any major new features coming soon. In fact, it appears that due to limited time and developers, the project is not progressing very fast at all. On the bright side, however, it looks like there is still active development going on.
Although Freevo Live might not be perfect, if you don’t care about the minor annoyances mentioned above and you want a simple home theater computer, Freevo Live might serve you well.
