I liked the Lindows name better than the Linspire name. I liked Lindows so much that I bought a copy for $50USD and downloaded it. They recently removed most of the command line tools (man pages, gcc, make, etc), and commented out sources for apt-get, and tried to make noobs use the CNR interface to pay for the rights to download F/OSS software. CNR is like Up2Date or Windows Update, but better, and with the option to buy commercial Linux software like StarOffice, Win4Lin, etc. Those who know better can find ways around it to download and install F/OSS as I did.

Remove the comments in the /etc/apt/sources.lst file then:
apt-get update
apt-get install man
apt-get install gcc

etc, then I am back in business.

I was able to install Apache2, PHP, and use their IPTables based firewall to open up port 80 without using a GUI interface. :)

I wonder if there was more to the lawsuit than the name? Lindows/Linspire seems to want to make the users pay for installing programs on their OS, and pay for extra things like Anti-Virus, Firewall, Photo programs, StarOffice, etc for that $159USD for the total Linspire package with tons of software. Since Linspire has a workable business model that actually may make some money, Microsoft nitpicked over the name Lindows being too much like Windows and hoped to get a piece of the pie. It looks like that gamble may have not paid off.

Lindows/Linspire is the easiest to install and configure Linux yet that I have seen, but only parts of it are GPL. The easier to install and configure stuff and custom applications like LPlayer, etc are not GPL, IIRC. It would be nice if they shared that code with other distros. Still there are F/OSS alternatives to the Linspire commercial applications.

Edit: they crippled RPM too. /var/lib/rpm/ was missing so I created it, ran apt-get install rpm and then rpm --initdb and rpm --rebuilddb and it fixed the problem of not being able to load RPMs with Linspire.