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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.
Who is this supposed to be a nuisance to?
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
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.
Probably to all the users who have to deal with G or GNU prepended to every program name.
gNewSense is a good start towards giving the users FREEdom with an entirely FREE operating system. Binary blobs are bad. Those that are willing to sacrifice source code for working drivers deserve neither.
But I'm concerned it doesn't go far enough. Even if the distro doesn't include non-FREE software in the repositories, users can still download and use it. Perhaps the OS should include a whitelist of hashes for all FREE software and only allow it to be run -- non-FREE software would terminate (SIGNOTFREE?). Or maybe a better approach would be to only execute binaries which have been encrypted/signed by the FSF, so we know it's FREE software.
I think that would ensure FREEdom.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
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.
If this is something that some people want, then that's great, more power to them. But I'm left with a lot of misgivings:
Find free books.
Who is this supposed to be a nuisance to?
It's a reference to RMS (or his PGP^H^H^HGPG key):
"The name originated as Gnusiance as a reference to RMS's GPG key, but was later changed to gNewSense by bbrazil and ompaul to also capture the New Sense of the distribution and as a pun on GNU."
http://www.gnewsense.org/index.php?n=FAQ.FAQ#toc4
And if it's supposed to be pronounced the same way GNU is it's pronounced "Guh-new-sense" which sounds like "Guh-nuisance"
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.
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
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
The point of GNewSense is to find places where Free Software isn't adequate to have a fully functioning system without binary blobs. If you're a business user [other than a hardware integrator, in which case your tech team might be using it to test your hardware's compatibility in a purely non-proprietary context], a non-FSF-fanatic home user, or otherwise someone in any way marketing-sensitive, you probably don't want to be running a distribution optimized for idiological purity over compatibility and convenience; as such, it's not meant for you. (Business users care about redistributability, of course, but a great many of the relevant binary blobs have that property anyhow. An embedded distribution built for license purity would be interesting to a great many people... but a good number of those users are liable to be skittish about the GPL as well, making their goals and the FSF's align considerably differently -- and Linux-centric embedded-system build toolkits generally already have license-management functionality anyhow).
Given that goal and context, why does the marketing matter?
it's ironic that the ideaology behind removing binary drivers is an attack on peoples freedoms - the freedom to develop and release software and hardware under the license that suits you. it's always seemed to me that RMS isn't about freedom, just his own twisted version of it.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
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.
I don't know if you meant to misspell "ideology", but somehow "idiology" seems like a more appropriate spelling in this context anyway...
Only the FSF would remove functionality and consider that to be a feature rather than a bug...
http://www.fsf.org/resources/hw
Knowing which hardware devices support GNU/Linux is important not only for practical reasons---you want your hardware to work with the software that you want to use---but also for ethical and political reasons. You can help the free software movement by purchasing hardware from manufacturers who support our goals and not purchasing from those who don't.
Join the Free Software Foundation
Why don't you use Ubuntu? And I'm not trying to troll, but why would the average person use GNewSense as a normal desktop rather than using Ubuntu which seems to have more of everything (more repos, more drivers, etc)
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Or humor - it could be humor.
Your thing was good too.
GNewSense is not meant for the average person the way Ubuntu/Fedora/OS X/Windows is. It is meant more or less for developers who want to either A) have a totally free system or B) have a free system as a base for other distros.
No matter what the people from the FSF will tell you, GNewSense is not meant for the average person.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
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.
GNU isn't a religion, it's a political-economic ideology reminiscent of anarcho-communism.
Marketing, being a politically correct word for propaganda, which is in its essence about domination of the individual through psychology, well, it's antithetical to the values of an anarcho-communist.
For these people, being able to achieve success without resorting to marketing and economic trickery is a validation of the viability of their world-view.
Do you refer to imperial-capitalist-pig-dog as a religion too?
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
on the MIT public keyserver
sig 135EA668 Richard Stallman (Chief GNUisance)
http://pgpkeys.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=vindex&search=0x894A158D
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
One very serious point to being "free" is that, if you are serious about security, you want as much of your software to be available for security audit as possible
You mean like the Debian OpenSSL patches, the community audited wide open security hole for mor than 1 1/2 years?
Communities where maintainers know each other by nothing else than email can easily be infiltrated by "hostile" talent. They offer high quality contributions, seem to spend very much time discussion patches with much professionalism and politeness. In the end it might be just the made up personality Jon Doe of some organization X waiting to place just this one unsuspicious line within the code.
When using commercial code, organization X needs much more than a diligent virtual personality but direct access to the corporate infrastructure.
Not everything is meant for the "OMG!1 lolz it sounds lik nuisance so it must be bad! lol" crowd.
Oh please, your "lolz I r can ev4luate software based on itz meritz!!11" crowd is so immature, because I put immature words in your mouth.
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
It's not really a completely free distro, as they allow documentation that uses the GFDL license with invariant sections. Many (including Debian) consider that to be a non-free license, and do not allow it.
While Debian (main) is 100% free, there are considered-useful packages that are very commonly distributed with Debian that are non-free.
http://nonfree.alioth.debian.org/
http://www.debian.org/social_contract
"We will support people who create or use both free and non-free works on Debian. We will never make the system require the use of a non-free component.... We acknowledge that some of our users require the use of works that do not conform to the Debian Free Software Guidelines. We have created "contrib" and "non-free" areas in our archive for these works. The packages in these areas are not part of the Debian system, although they have been configured for use with Debian."
The reason the FSF (and RMS) won't promote Debian is because of the non-free components that are in the most common standard installations of Debian.
Ask me about repetitive DNA
It's GNU/Program Name, you insensitive clod!
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
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.
"free as in freedom" is a distortion because it is still ambiguous what perspective the freedom comes from.
My baseline interpretation of freedom with regards to open source development is that BSD/MIT is vastly more "free" than GNU. And understanding this, I recognize that you may think the opposite.
Marketing, being a politically correct word for propaganda
Until you provide a source I will take that as your opinion. Here is what I have seen as a definition of marketing:
"Marketing is the performance of activities that seek to accomplish an organization's objectives by anticipating customer or client needs and directing a flow of need-satisfying goods and services from producer to customer or client." (Essentials of Marketing 11th edition Perreault, Cannon, McCarthy)
So sure, you could use propaganda to achieve marketing but that is really a short-sited view of marketing in general.
For these people, being able to achieve success without resorting to marketing and economic trickery is a validation of the viability of their world-view.
How? Why? Why does marketing automatically equate to "economic trickery" in your opinion? And why does this imply that their "world-view" is viable?
In other words, let's suppose I build a product or provide a service, and I decide to have zero marketing. None, zip, nothing at all. The product or service has a name, but the name implies nothing of the product's nature. How successful would such a product be? Keep in mind that things like websites, showing the product to others, and simple things like that are forms of marketing. But what I have here is essentially a product in a vault and the only person that knows of the product's existence is myself. Such products do exist but do you honestly expect people to understand that it exists without any form of marketing?
Hell, let's get real. I had such a product, it was a customized user interface for a video game which I thought to be superior in some ways to other interfaces available. Initially I had no intention of releasing the interface or allowing others to use the customized interface. That meant zero marketing for my product and I was the only user. The entire population would not know that I was using the interface and therefore nobody except myself used the product.
Eventually I did "marketing" even though I wasn't aware that it was "marketing". My friends saw my using the interface and eventually wanted to use it as well. Later I posted a video intending to focus on my game-play (not the interface) and people watching the video wanted copies of the interface. Eventually I created a website for the interface (easier to distribute) and before I knew it, a significantly large portion of the players were download and using my interface while I slept. Each of these marketing elements contributed to expand the reach and use of the product. And I'll bet you that most of those people were thankful that they had access to it than to never have had access.
Sure, I never ran an ad, or tried to put out a video convincing people that my interface was superior or that they needed it. I simply did the bare minimum in marketing gestures on "promotion" and "place" (made the interface available, and it was free) and let the product sell itself. But that is still marketing.
I will give you that some forms of marketing such as advertising are not necessarily the greatest or most appreciated and are in fact annoying. But at some point, I am sure you have come across a product that you actually liked or wanted/needed and if it hadn't been for some type of marketing then you would have never known that that product or service existed.
In fact some of these products or services may not even have been from a for-profit mega corporation, but instead from a non-profit organization like a school. All organizations that want to serve a target audience will participate in some form of marketing if they want to be successful.
Aparently they don't know about gobuntu , wich is exactly the same as they are doing , namely a completely free distro.
Granted , maybe gNewSense existed before Gobuntu.
I'll check the date stamps
Slipping shoelaces ?
Actually Gnubuntu existed first (November 2005), but nothing more than an IRC channel and some artwork came of it. We started talking about gNewSense in May 2006 as a way to make Gnubuntu happen, with the first release 2 years ago today (August 25th 2006).
A quick check indicates that Gobuntu was first released July 10th 2007.
See https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2005-November/013261.html http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/130
Debian comes with non-free blobs. Taking the first Debian system to hand (Etch) and pulling the kernel source I see the very first file we remove is in there (drivers/atm/atmsar11.data) and many others. Ubuntu adds a few (and I believe is taking the kernel from kernel.org rather than Debian these days), but Debian is not all-free.
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.
The recipient has 1 and 3 (study and improve), even if they don't have the source. Sure, it's not as easy, but their freedom exists.
It's quite ridiculous to claim that someone's freedom is being denied by not giving them additional material. According to RMS's definition of freedom, I was under no obligation to give them the software in the first place, so by that logic not giving anything denies no freedom, but giving the software without the source denies freedom. Absurd.
Imagine I gave you a printed book for free, but not the source. Am I denying your freedoms?
Imagine a world without copyrights. Natural freedoms would exist -- use, copy, and modify all you want. The GPL clause of requiring source would have no legal basis. Any law created to enforce the GPL would only serve to deny freedom. This would be akin to consumer protection laws, some of which I approve of, some I don't, but don't call it freedom. That's just spin.
If it can suck all the hardcore purists into a place where they can quit annoying the rest of us, that'll be great.
"freedom 3" is actually a burden, or a bond, not a freedom. I don't think there is a problem with writing that into the license, as long as folks agree to it before proceeding to use software under it. It's just not aptly named a "freedom."
Speak for yourself.