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FSF-Sponsored gNewSense 2.1 Released
An anonymous reader writes "gNewSense, the fully-free GNU/Linux distribution sponsored by the FSF, has released a 2.1 live CD (torrent). Since the last release, more non-free binary blobs have been removed, new artwork has been added and lots of other improvements have been made. It's also two years since the first edition of gNewSense, and in that time an impressive ten live CDs have been released! gNewSense 2.1 DeltaH is based on Ubuntu Hardy, and removes non-free software that other distributions don't." I wonder if gNewSense can be easily installed on an OLPC XO the way several other distros can.
Can I buy any old machine from Dell, HP, Lenovo, etc. that works with Ubuntu, and expect it to work fully (graphics, sound, wireless, etc.) with GNewSense?
If so, it would be a philosophically refreshing way of computing. Otherwise, pile it on the list of OS cruft that doesn't work.
There are already hundreds (thousands?) of Linux distros. But apparently all of them have licensing terms that are Evil, so we need one another one.
Or do we? Each existing distro has some kind of user community, and presumably those users have some reason for preferring that particular distro. Are they going to abandon their current distro and and switch to this one, just because it meets the FSF's arcane political requirements? And if your distro doesn't have a user community, why bother creating it?
I really, truly believe that "Free Software(tm)", "Agile Methodology," or "Ruby on Rails" are all forms of the religion "virus" that infect brains with creator stories, only dressed up in a nice, geek friendly suit.
- Linux heavy blogs are forms of church.
- Closed source printer drivers are the original sin.
- RMS is the prophet who will save us from our sins
- OLPC is the nerd equivalent of a missionary spreading the gospel of Free Software to the heathens in "3rd world countries"
- Microsoft is the devil.
Want more?
- Catholicism and other religions are heavy on using guilt. Guilt usually is the result of doing something pleasurable.
- In the GNU religion, guilt comes from taking pleasure in using "non-free software".
- It is honorable to suffer in the quest towards enlightenment.
- Gnusense requires suffering because most things do not work. Thus, you suffer and become a true member of the GNU religion.
- You can cleanse yourself of this guilt and prove yourself by abstaining from non-free software.
- BSD, Creative Commons licenses, and other licenses are geek versions of The Koran, Buddhist literature, or the Tanakh. These documents go against god (RMS)'s word and those who use them should have their Code assimilated by the GPL.
I could go on, but I'm kinda serious. It is scary how close the GNU/GPL/FSF thing parallels major religions. The methods used by the brain virus (think a genetic virus, only the meme version) operate on the same kinds of "Sin" and "Pain/Suffering/Pleasure" emotions the old-school religions like Catholicism did.
GNUsense is just the beginning of modern tech-religions. It won't be long before the Futurama's "Church of Star Wars" comes true. Or perhaps followers of the GNU faith will become reckless like the Star Trek nerds in Futurama did and we'll have to send RMS and crew to a remote planet inhabited by floating clouds of Slashdot nerd dust who make him do tricks.
The two biggest reasons why Ubuntu came into being in the first place were:
1. Releases not happening fast enough
2. A dogmatic belief that abstaining from using proprietary software will cause the development of free replacements.
The solution to the first was to insist on a 6 month release schedule. The solution to the second was to put forward the policy that the best of all alternatives will be chosen, so if you want the free alternative to win, make it better than the proprietary alternative.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Presumably to the manufacturers of hardware which contains binary-only drivers.
The idea is that it's a deliberately stress-testing distribution designed to be 100% Free and to cause any hardware which isn't Free to fail. If nobody complains that broken stuff is broken, it won't get fixed. And requiring binary drivers *is* breakage. As soon as the kernel updates, potentially wham! go your drivers if there's no source code.
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the conditions that surround him... The unreasonable man adapts surrounding conditions to himself... All progress depends on the unreasonable man." -- George Bernard Shaw.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
This is my third post to this thread and hopefully I'll shut up about this GNU=Religion thing but again if you view...
I know it's unfair to expect FOSS programmers to be marketing experts, but it really shouldn't take any imagination to see what a terrible name this is, and how much names matter.
... through the lens of religion not marketing it makes sense. Being a true beliver in any kind of growing religion requires you think against the grain (and often common sense) in order to prove your worth.
If you take the idea that most "GNU Geeks" see "marketdriods" as pretty much the devil, it makes sense that they named it this. After all, says the "GNU Geek", "Marketing is stupid and anybody worthy of this operating system will not care what the name of it is, so we'll name it something geeky (GNU-newspeak for stupid) to sift out the non-believers".
The reason this stuff works is that if forces the follower of the religion to go against common sense. Most christians on some level know "heaven/hell" is probably not fact. Most GNU followers know marking serves a place, and it works even on them. But the act of forcing their concious mind to rebel against the urges (and common sense) provided by their sub-conscious causes suffering, which they rationalize as "I'm proving my worth".
Hell, GNU wouldn't be able to market itself as a religion if they tried doing anything at all that resembles marketing. The fact that this brain virus makes its host have to force their brain to counteract reality is what makes it, just like other religions, so effective.
Only the FSF would remove functionality and consider that to be a feature rather than a bug...
Don't use a PC with a proprietary BIOS.
Try find anything that meets that at all.
These days all non-trivial chipsets and devices (mouse, monitor, graphics card, disk drives etc) have proprietary firmware built into them and are designed with some sort of HDL (essentially software). If you really want free computing then you should insist on those being free too.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
>OLPC is the nerd equivalent of a missionary >spreading the gospel of Free Software to the >heathens in "3rd world countries"
Did you miss that whole episode where they decided that they wouldnt be spreading the free software gospel and the vrious heads and security guys who quit the project?
St Nicholas has lost the free software faith.
In return, many of his followers have lost faith in him.
Well, I think the question can be answered with a question - why not just use Microsoft Vista? I'd have less to worry about than Ubuntu.
I like Gnewsense because it is free as in freedom, as opposed to free as in beer. I have no need of the binary blobs and such that Ubuntu has. Using Gnewsense makes me aware of what is free and not free. There still is no full-fledged free Java right now (although Sun says they're releasing a free version of Java). Yes there are free clones, but not a full-fledged one like Sun's. This is something I didn't know until I began using an OS in the Debian family (previously I used Debian, now I use Gnewsense). It also makes me aware of the freeness of stuff like Flash on sites like Youtube. I use gnash, which has problems, and I haven't even fully hooked it into Firefox yet - I grab the Youtube URL and run videos on the command line. It also makes me aware of free Flash alternatives like SVG.
Once you are into more than 10,000 seats your own distribution, containing only the software that you want it to contain, providing a secure basic company wide install and, can has a range of flavours to suit the various desks it ends up on, starts to make a lot of sense.
Also if your are into low cost appliance styled computers, this provides a easy to add onto distribution to suit your particular appliance, be it a home broadband modem/router/switch/family server or a smart phone/PDA or a budget UMPC or a TV with pretensions of being a computer/server. It would certainly serve a lot of compatibility issues.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Been there, done that. In such an environment, one generally wants support for some amount of proprietary software -- be it Oracle or JRockit or Splunk or something completely different. One also wants a base with long-term support (such as CentOS or an Ubuntu LTS release). GNewSense doesn't fit the bill.
Ehh, no. Building something like that, even glibc can be too heavy. Notice my mention of specialized embedded distros? They exist for a reason; desktop distros are not a good starting place.
Easy. Vista isn't Unix.
Your dedication to maintaining a substandard existence is admirable. No wait. That's not the word. What is it? Oh yeah. Pitiable.
Oh. And SVG doesn't support video, so you're still screwed.
No. Its the fact that its usability has been gimped.
Ha ha.
You're a zealot. Gimp can be learned in minutes. Gimp doesn't follow all the user interface conventions that it should but it follows most, has extensive online help and is more usable than most other programs, proprietary or otherwise. If gimp is difficult for you to use then I'd suggest you look in the mirror, not at gimp.
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Beware deceptive astroturfers.