[clue-tech] Fedora 11 released

[Keith Christian]

Check out Debian for an absolutely free distribution.  It has more distributions based on it than any other core compilation, IIRC.  It has the advantage that it doesn't inhiibit the installation of non-free software if the user so chooses.

I wonder wat gNewSense is up to if instructions don't exist to include non-free software.

========Keith




________________________________
From: Peter Kuykendall <peterkuykendall at gmail.com>
To: 990287.25071245592975910.JavaMail.root at zimbra.thegeek.nu; CLUE tech <clue-tech at cluedenver.org>
Sent: Sunday, June 21, 2009 2:45:35 PM
Subject: [clue-tech] Fedora 11 released

>Fedora is among the purest, the most committed to Freedom of all the popular distributions.

I'm very glad to see this; thanks for posting it.  I was amazed to find out that the kernel is chock full of nonfree code, in direct violation of the GPL, and there doesn't seem to be a lot of interest in fixing this upstream.  So I downloaded a Gnewsense VM (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnewsense) and have been pretty impressed.  Of course, the VM works well despite being crippled by lack of nonfree wireless, etc. because it depends on those services being available in the host, which in my case is a very nonfree corporate XP laptop.  But it's refreshing to see that there are real efforts to create truly free distros, even to the point of excising nonfree code from the kernel.  And it is possible to buy wireless cards and dongles that can be driven by free code.

>From Wikipedia:

"gNewSense is a GNU/Linux operating system that uses free software.[2] gNewSense is based on Ubuntu.[2] It tries to maintain the user-friendliness of Ubuntu but with the non-free software and binary blobs removed. The Free Software Foundation considers gNewSense to be a free operating system.[3]

gNewSense takes a strict stance against non-free software. For example, any documentation that gives instructions on installing non-free software is excluded.[4]

The project was launched by Brian Brazil and Paul O'Malley in 2006. In October 2006, after the 0.85 release,[5] it was given assistance by the Free Software Foundation.[6]"

- Pete 
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