Comments on: Ubuntu lumping troublesome stuff together

By: Multistanza and Medibuntu « Freedom Dreams

Multistanza and Medibuntu « Freedom Dreams — Wed, 14 May 2008 07:30:26 +0000

[...] from my last post, I decided that the best way to try and solve this issue would be to create a free-multiverse [...]

By: Ben Webb

Ben Webb — Sat, 10 May 2008 20:26:05 +0000

Awwww, I like the 3D effects :S. But, I do hope to get a standard network card. Thing is, I don’t know how I’d tell what cards will and won’t require non-free firmware. Also, one of my pcs uses wireless, and I should imagine that gnewsense support wireless cards are rather hard to come by.

Why is software incredibly important for fimrware? I will agree it is of some importance, but surely its not as important as having a free software OS. In fact, I would place its importance on a similar level to that of having a free software bios. Although, you have a point about hardware manufacturers loosing nothing. However, the same applies to drivers, and look at how incredibly reluctant most companies are to release them as free software!

By: Tim Dobson

Tim Dobson — Sat, 10 May 2008 18:14:23 +0000

oh god, only touch gentoo if you have a few days to lose
does sound a neat feature though.
/me puts on his teflon suit.

I was on debian etch for ages, which was fine, though i find that i really need more exciting things because etch is stable but essentially boring.

I’m seriously thinking of moving to gnewsense 2.0.
oen thing to bear in mind is that you caan always add extra repositories and packages while still keeping the core gnewsense - sure you’ll have problems but it will mostly work

on another note, ditch 3d FX they are fucking annoying, get yourself a standard network card (freecycle.org/your local cuncil tip/recycling point etc are good places to pick up one on the cheap) - the gnewsense live cd i have works in at least two of my machines.

on the other note, free software is incredibly important on firmware bits and bobs - and considering that the hardware amnufacturers are selling you a physical product, they lose nothing from making their horrible firmware free software.

By: Ben Webb

Ben Webb — Fri, 09 May 2008 22:10:02 +0000

No, my whole point is that gNewSense only contains packages from main and universe. Hence, a fully free version of multiverse would be useful for gNewSense users also.

PS. Grrr, forgot to log in.

By: fophillips

fophillips — Fri, 09 May 2008 15:37:08 +0000

Ben, there isn’t an example licenses.conf unfortunately. I have a licenses.conf with only free licenses if you want to take a look.

On the note of compiling from source, most big packages (GHC, Open Office, Firefox. Not GCC) have binary packages you can install. Most of them you need to compile from source.

Although, wouldn’t it be possible just to use the gNewSense repositories?

By: libervis

libervis — Fri, 09 May 2008 13:00:54 +0000

You’re making an excellent point about multiverse. It also reminds me of the annoyance of people sometimes saying how GNU/Linux doesn’t misses media codecs (while they’re actually just not all installed by default) yet we have full Free Software support for that - it’s just the patent issues which spoil the picture, and that’s only in *some* countries.

I for one just have multiverse enabled and I take what I need from there and mostly ignore the rest. Occasionally when I look for something and am not sure I can see in the properties dialog if this is from multiverse.

I was using Debian Sid for a while and it was good until I did a dist-upgrade. Maybe I was just out of luck, but not being able to boot afterwards and not being very motivated to fix such basic problems I ended up going back to Ubuntu.

So aside from a possible gNewSense with free-multiverse, I’m not really sure it can get any better than Ubuntu.. maybe Debian Testing as a middle ground of stability between sid and stable and with the usual Debian’s repo classification, if you don’t mind a little older packages.

Cheers

By: Ben Webb

Ben Webb — Fri, 09 May 2008 10:52:01 +0000

Now, that is a really nice idea. Maybe I’ll give gentoo a try sometime. A couple of things though, I don’t want to compile from source (does gentoo have an option for installing binaries), and I want all free licenses (presumably there will be a pre-made licenses.conf file for that). At the moment, I am most familiar with debian based distributions, but it would be nice to try something different.

By: fophillips

fophillips — Thu, 08 May 2008 16:47:09 +0000

paludis (alternative package manager for Gentoo) offers license masking. You put the licenses you want to accept (or disallow) in a licenses.conf and it will only install software with those licenses. You can also provide rules for specific packages, so if you really, really need non-free package evil-software/X you can add “evil-software/X evil_license” to licenses.conf so you can install it without inadvertently installing more non-free packages.