Freespire

One look at the boot menu of the live CD and the Kubuntu influence is not deniable. The Kubuntuness continues through out the installation, the booting progress bar is the same, asn it the ability to switch to Adminitrator mode with a click of a button in any application.

The differences unfortunately make it a worse distro that Kubuntu. The Live CD does not allow installation from within, the option is available only at boot time. This is an irritant. But, more importantly, it does not allow creating partitions during the installation as well. Which is strange. But I do recall some other distro exhibiting a similarly irritating behaviour, not Kubuntu though.
So to create partitions, one has to reboot and then choose the partition disk option.
After the partition is identified, the files are copied and the system is restarted. Missed something? Damn right. No bootloader configuration!( Kubuntu has it.) After reboot, the Grub installed by Opensuse was overwritten. The only entries in the new bootloader referred to Freespire. Considering the Opensuse's Grub has managed to automatically create a link to the PC Linux installation, after the latter, Freespire's bootload installation procedures seems immature and irresponsible.
After booting, the default interface is too chunky. Fonts are too big, and more space is lost in the padding. Check screenshot : notice the taskbar, the windows are NOT arranged in two rows, check the space lost in the window title bar. The default theme will be replaced soon.

Installed Freespire on the laptop.
ON the application front, I could see Realplayer which is a first. I was also surprised to see Gparted since the default windows manager is KDE. Need to check if Gparted is a part of Gnome. A Firefox lookalike is available that is simply called Web Browser.Linspire is the first distro to accept autologin of root user as well, and it doesn't complain if the root password is not entered at all. Nice.

On the system configuration front, Linspire is attuned to the dumb user. Unlike most other distro which have two control panels - one each for the window manager and linux - Linspire only has the window manager control panel. So after searching for a while, I concluded that there is no Gui to alter the boot loader code.

A few minutes later:
Searching for a way to change the bootloader configuration, I remembered a friendly advice at linuxquestions.org, that the Grub menu.lst file can be edited with a text editor to show additional boot menu entries. Trying to browse through the contents of the disk I discovered that Linspire will not reveal those contents either. Even the root account cannot access folders on the hard disk besides the root folder. No etc, no usr, no grub. Looks like it's time to head to google.