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Trisquel 6.0 'Toutatis' Is Now Available
New submitter ikhider writes "Trisquel, a 'libre' version of Ubuntu GNU/Linux, is now available for download and install (or update for those who already have it). It's one of the easiest 'libre' versions of Gnu/Linux to install and run. This version includes: Linux-Libre 3.2, Xorg, Abrowser 19 (a Firefox derivative that does not recommend non-free software), GNOME 3.4, and LibreOffice 3.5. They're also simplifying their release schedule: 'This release is a Long Term Support one, meaning that bugfix and security updates will be published until 2017. Along with this we have decided to change our release schedule from this point on: we will no longer publish short term support versions every 6 months, but focus on giving the best possible support to the LTS release, providing backported improvements to core packages like the kernel, the browser and the xorg server among others.'"
just about filled out my FOSS bullshit bingo card on this sumary.
if you complete a row, you shout:
FIRST POST!
I don't get all the Ubuntu spin-offs. Canonical is obviously going far, far away from what these spinoffs are doing - why not just use Debian as the base distribution instead of Ubuntu, which is based on Debian itself?
Does anybody know how well the Linux Steam client runs on this?
Steam? I thought installing non-free software such as games defeated the purpose of using Trisquel over, say, Xubuntu.
no your average Ubuntu user will not move to trisquel, trisquels philosophy is diametrically opposed to what steam stands for. ubuntu users will either go to mint Debian or maybe fedora.
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
I'm pretty sure if you install Steam on this distro, RMS will be summoned to your house to punch your fucking mouth loose. Be warned.
The purpose of this distro is for FOSS fans. They want something completely free. So they base the distro off of Ubuntu one of the least Libre of all the distros out there. Canonical, especially lately, has been moving away from GNU/Linux and moving towards Ubuntu/Linux. They really have been suffering from NIH(Not Invented Here) syndrome and have been working against the rest of the community. Especially with Mir, which is causing a lot of unnecessary and harmful fragmentation. If you want to make a free libre distro, why not base it off of Debian or Fedora? At-least Red Hat contributes what they do back to the community at large. Canonical doesn't contribute much at all back to the rest of the world. Especially with their own licencing agreement.
Does anybody know how well the Linux Steam client runs on this?
Unless they really ripped things up more than expected(or Steam demands a bunch of proprietary libraries, rather than just blobbing them in), I'd assume that it would run more or less entirely the same.
The only significant caveat, of course, is that games tend to be hard on the GPU, and FOSS GPU driver performance can be a bit... touchy. Intel GMAs work about as well as they ever do with free drivers(does Intel even bother to maintain a proprietary branch on linux?); but just aren't that fast. AMD GPU performance under free drivers varies by family; but tends to lag their proprietary driver in pure punch(although it sometimes leads it in playing nicely). Nvidia's proprietary driver is generally considered the best; but the alternatives are either Nouveau, which makes the AMD FOSS drivers look mature and powerful, or almost nothing(Nvidia's official advice is as follows Our advice to owners of NVIDIA GPUs running Linux is to use the VESA X driver from the time of Linux distribution installation until they can download and install the NVIDIA Linux driver from their distribution repositories or from nvidia.com.
So, you will likely be able to install it; but unless you have an Intel GPU, or specific AMD parts, or even more specific Nvidia parts, you'll end up shoving so much binary blob into your kernel in order to meaningfully use it that your objective in installing it isn't really clear...
RMS is not a violent man.
I've just installed an updated driver for my 7600GT. Granted it's on legacy support (till 2017). Nvidia supports their cards for really long.
Their are two issues with your post : it's hard telling users who want to run a game they should live with 20 to 30% of the performance for the hardware they paid for, and less 3D features, more bugs etc. I can run some Steam games brilliantly on that now ancient card, I think a 9500GT with nouveau would be significantly worse (nor do I want to waste precious CPU cycles in the driver)
The other is there's no Intel graphics card to buy.
Castilian is what we usually refer to as "Spanish", I think.
What's the support policy? If it's still three years, then Ubuntu LTS now has longer support than debian stable : five years for all uses.
Why not just run Debian?
The problem with Debian is that it recommends non-free software with its non-free and contrib repositories. That means that the user might be tricked into running software that does not honor the user's freedom. That is considered non-ethical.
It's my current desktop and it works extremely well.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Toutatis was a god of the Gaules.
Unless you're a ninja.
You're a temporary arrangement of matter sliding towards oblivion in a cold, uncaring universe
Steam doesn't work on mint debian. It requires glibc 2.15, and lmde only has glibc 2.13.
It's always possible to install a more recetn version, but it's easier to just use a more up-to-date distrib.
The purpose of this distro is for FOSS fans. They want something completely free.
Not FOSS fans, just the FSF, or the 'Libre-Linux' crowd. The few purists who think that liberated software is an end in itself, regardless of the quality compromises that have to be made in order to attain it. The handful who thinks that having binary blobs of things whose source code is not readily available for free distribution is contaminating software.
So they base the distro off of Ubuntu one of the least Libre of all the distros out there. Canonical, especially lately, has been moving away from GNU/Linux and moving towards Ubuntu/Linux.
Why should Canonical stay w/ GNU, when the FSF, for starters, had long excluded Canonical from their list of endorsed distros (see the GNU website)? Besides, Canonical has adhered to all the licenses of all the software that they use - their Linux is still GPL2. Only thing - for their newly created stuff, they dual- license them - like Mir will be multi-licensed under GPL3, LGPL3 and BSDL.
They really have been suffering from NIH(Not Invented Here) syndrome and have been working against the rest of the community. Especially with Mir, which is causing a lot of unnecessary and harmful fragmentation.
How is Mir creating any fragmentation, when Wayland is not yet ready? Yeah, there is Wayland 1.0, but it's hardly been widely adapted, and waiting for it means extra delays in their plans. I thought that the whole thing about 'software freedom' was that developers had the freedom to develop whatever they wanted and put it out there, and let the market decide whether they want it or not. How is the creation of a new Windowing system, or a new Desktop Environment, or a new kernel, or a new OS, or a new anything work against the 'rest of the community'?
If you want to make a free libre distro, why not base it off of Debian or Fedora? At-least Red Hat contributes what they do back to the community at large.
Canonical doesn't contribute much at all back to the rest of the world. Especially with their own licencing agreement.
Better idea - if you want to make a liberated distro, how about getting people to actually work on creating new liberated components that go into the making of such a system. In this case, why not work seriously in getting HURD out - in which case, you don't have to bellyache about Linux having non-free software in the first place. I'm glad that in one thing, they are putting their money where their mouth is and including GNOME 3.4 (that's something that neither Ubuntu nor Debian are doing), and hope they do more of it. Hey, even they could do their own version of, say, a NeWS like display server to replace X11, and put it under GPL3. If they do everything, they could end up w/ a completely liberated system which they could then promote to the world. But that would require FSF people turning away from evangelizing liberated software to first producing that liberated software in the first place.
WTF does libre mean in this context? Or are we talking about Mexican wrestlers again?
The term Libre is used by many in the FOSS community instead of "free", so they won't have to keep explaining the diference between "free as in speech" (free to use and modify) and "free as in beer" (cost).
They're downstream from Ubuntu instead of Debian because Ubuntu is more end user-friendly than Debian. I would imagine that could change depending on how Ubuntu changes over the next few releases.
I'll be downloading Toutatis today. Along with my main (gaming) rig (which runs Linux Mint), I maintain a "free box", which contains nothing but 100% Free (tm) software, mostly as an experiment to gauge the current status of how useful a box with only free software is (or isn't). I have to say, it's become a lot easier than it was in the old days, where almost nothing worked after you stripped out the nonfree bits. Modems and network cards were notoriously hard to get working. Brigantia, the prevous release of Trisquel, supports every peice of hardware on the box except the ethernet port (the box has an nVidia nForce-based motherboard), but the wireless worked, so I didn't really try. Interestingly, I've been increasingly using the free box over my gaming rig for day-to-day use, and may end up scrapping the gaming rig as I don't game as much these days.
Some things that are challenging on a free box:
- Anything that requires heavy graphical use, e.g., no serious games. The free box has an nVidia card, running X using nouveau.
- Flash-based stuff is iffy. I have flash video supported, but no apps (and in my case at least, little of value was lost).
- Any java programs that require Sun's implementation of java.
- The fonts are hard to look at. Does anyone konw here I can get some good libre fonts?
- Using proprietary audio/video formats. In many cases playback works, ostensibly becuase in many countries there are no software patents (yet). Since I''m in the USA and try to keep the Free box free, I stick to free formats (fortunately I ripped most of my music collection to FLAC a long time ago. For the free box, I wrote a script to go thorugh my collection and convert any remaining mp3's to Ogg).
As you can see, most of the issues revolve around proprietary languages, hardware, fonts, etc.
Congrats to the folks who put Trisquel together for getting Toutatis out. I can't wait to try it!
"Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?"
Why not just run Debian?
The problem with Debian is that it recommends non-free software with its non-free and contrib repositories. That means that the user might be tricked into running software that does not honor the user's freedom. That is considered non-ethical.
What are the users - complete illiterates, that they can't read that certain software is 'non-free' and therefore not download it? Debian recognizes that for some software, particularly drivers, the liberated software may not cover it, so they provide the 'non-free' as an option. RMS thinks that people should deliberately be not told that these alternatives - actually supplements - exist, and since Debian doesn't do what he wants, he avoids endorsing them either. That's part of why the 'Libre-Linux' sub-movement exists.
Previously, the FSF and Stallman used to use the term 'free software', which was pretty misleading, since the first thing that one would think of hearing it would be price. This led to their long winded 'free-as-in-freedom-but-not-as-in-beer' explanations. So more recently, they've substituted the word 'free' w/ 'libre' so that people wouldn't have that confusion.
I do think it's an improvement, but I'd have preferred them using the term 'Liberated Software' instead of 'Libre', so that anyone who knows English, but not necessarily Spanish, would instantly know what it means. I use the term 'Liberated Software' whenever I'm talking about what the FSF used to refer to as 'Free Software'.
No.
The problem with Debian is that Debian has a non-free repository and documents this fact. Whether the user will be confused about whether or not he is installing non-free software is not the issue at all.
RMS maintains that documenting the existence of non-free software, even if the repo is not enabled by default and requires manual intervention to enable, is "suggesting" that it be used and this suggestion is tantamount to a recommendation to use non-free software, which RMS thinks is a thing that a fully freedom-loving distribution should not do.
Can a distro fully respect your freedoms and still document the existence of non-free software? I think so, but since the FSF is in the business of promoting Free software to the exclusion of all else they cannot endorse a distribution which fully respects your freedoms but mentions that non-free software exists. This is an entirely reasonable stance for the FSF; they can choose who they endorse based on any arbitrary criteria, and I respect that.
The Debian folks must necessarily take a more pragmatic view since their primary mission is not to promote Free software to the exclusion of all else. This does not mean that they are behaving in an unethical manner or in a manner which is inconsistent with the FSF principles and ideals, it's just at odds with some of their policies.
I want my Cowboyneal
I love Debian... but for the desktop? It doesn't work that well.
:)
Your desktop is not everyone else's desktop. I work on a Debian testing development machine every day and it's beyond awesome. Now, if you'd say it doesn't work that well for everyone, I would agree. And for avoiding yet another Debian vs. flamewar, I'm stopping here
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
The average Ubuntu user won't go to another GNU/Linux distribution. They're more likely to move on to another OS altogether, maybe another Unix-like system like the Mac or even Chrome OS if their needs don't go beyond Twitter and Facebook. An Android system would also be attractive since it supposedly also runs Linux. I've just been to a local store (southeast Asia) where they're actually selling an Android 4.0 netbook by some no-name Chinese manufacturer. So full circle even if in a small way for Google's smartphone OS.
The average Ubuntu user won't go to another GNU/Linux distribution. They're more likely to move on to another OS altogether, maybe another Unix-like system like the Mac or even Chrome OS if their needs don't go beyond Twitter and Facebook. An Android system would also be attractive since it supposedly also runs Linux. I've just been to a local store (southeast Asia) where they're actually selling an Android 4.0 netbook by some no-name Chinese manufacturer. So full circle even if in a small way for Google's smartphone OS.
I don't think you understand what 'freedom' really means here. It means those 4 things on the GNU page, something you don't get w/ Microsoft Windows. That doesn't imply that anything that looks like Windows, or works like Office or Steam is revulsive. What it means is that while people can have things that look or work like Windows, they should have the wherewithal to change it, which they only can if they have the source code, and know how to do it. There is no reason something that installs on Ubuntu shouldn't install on Trisquel or RMS' own favorite - gNewSense, unless the makers of those distros have deliberately crippled it. But not everyone who appreciates free knows how to do '.configure && make && make install'. Which is why you have all those intermediate distro packages, like .deb or .rpm.
so does FreeBSD but it's so not worth the effort.
I'm god, but it's a bit of a drag really...
So if you were tired of running MySQL at level one, now you can dial it down to zero with NoSQL or up to three with TriSQL... oh wait
I think that's a stretch. I'm a dissatisfied Ubuntu user and right now I am switching back and forth between my Aptosid and Fedora partitions as alternatives.
given that english does not have a clean way of saying free = unrestricted and not free = no "money" cost i don't think so
(and yes you can have a US$M program that is GPLed )
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
You seem to be confusing the LTS with six month releases for Ubuntu.
The Long Term Support releases are every other year, usually in April, and are supported with security updated for 5 years on the server, and 3 years on the desktop.
The six month releases are the unstable ones, but the LTS are very stable.
Been using them for many years and yes, I sysadmin several systems, both servers and desktops (KDE though), and things are good.
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
well the installer has been modded to run on Debian so it should run on Debian mint.
http://linux.slashdot.org/story/13/03/04/1716213/gamer-rewrites-valves-steam-installer-for-debian
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
I have nothing against the Intel drivers, it's just that none of Intel's GPUs are particularly powerful, and(more annoyingly) Intel tends to reserve the most powerful GPUs for their more powerful and expensive CPUs(which are total overkill for most applications that any Intel GPU is capable of).
I'm a dissatisfied Ubuntu user
Well, you're obviously more patient than I am. ;-)
I've been primarily a Slackware user since the mid-'90s (though until recently I ran Arch on my laptop), but occasionally I pull down a current version of Ubuntu just to see what I'm missing. However, I always find Ubuntu annoys me to the point that I end up blowing it away after a couple of hours.
The link recommends bull... nv is much better than Vesa, though doesn't offer 3D acceleration / DRI, it offers much more 2D optimization, which Vesa offers none. Nowdays there is also Nouveau, which is FOSS nvidia driver with 3D acceleration, though it's features are only fraction of those NVidia has and their drivers provide. So the best options are from best to worst:
1. nvidia official binary blob
2. Nouveau
3. nv
4 vesa
In capitalist USA corporations control the government.
Said the AC.
ACs name calling?
Coward is rude when his actions are unaccountable. News at 11!
I have to say, it's become a lot easier than it was in the old days, where almost nothing worked after you stripped out the nonfree bits. Modems and network cards were notoriously hard to get working.
How old days was this? I know it was hard before, but when I got into Linux (Red Hat 7.1) I still had to hand hunt RPM's to install dependencies, but network cards and even most of time video cards (I never got my old P200MMX with Hercules Stingray 128 3D to work with X but with nvidia I had the choice between nv and proprietary drivers) worked fine out of box - even so that moving my install HD to another computer usually didn't need any other changes than possibly changing the video driver name in XFree config file...
In capitalist USA corporations control the government.