On Mon, Jun 27, 2016 at 08:48:16AM +1000, Ozi Traveller wrote: > That's a good question! I tried too but couldn't get there either. :( > > http://linux.softpedia.com/get/System/Operating-Systems/Linux-Distributions/gNewSense-17250.shtml > https://trisquel.info/en/forum/release-gnewsense-4-beta-codenamed-ucclia > https://libreplanet.org/wiki/Free_distros_torrent
I would strongly recommend against using gNewSense for anything but a throw-away test box. They leave critical bugs unpatched that cause data loss, random crashes, security issues, for ideological reasons. Let's see for example CPU microcode. I prefer AMD as they're far less backdoored than Intel, but what about this: https://lists.debian.org/debian-security/2016/03/msg00084.html An unprivileged user, even contained in an unprivileged virtual machine, can execute arbitrary code in the host's kernel. Yay. Like most CPU bugs, this one affects only a few processor models, but as there's several tens of severe bugs per year, and that's counting only found &fixed&announced ones, there's plenty for every model. Recent Intel CPUs are especially bad here: http://danluu.com/cpu-bugs/, up to disabling widely hyped extensions: https://techreport.com/news/26911/errata-prompts-intel-to-disable-tsx-in-haswell-early-broadwell-cpus Yes, free software is vital, not just for ideological but also practical reasons, but if you don't have free hardware to run it on, I'd prefer the non-free hardware to at least work reliably. And without the microcode update, you're running a non-free blob anyway -- the version you have burned into the CPU's ROM, just as non-free as the update but more buggy. And it's not a matter of just firmware (for CPU, network cards, etc). What about running X on modern graphics cards? Nouveau causes crashes on mine while the proprietary driver works reliably. Graphics driver debugging requires some very specific skills -- I for one couldn't do anything above reporting a bug and providing serial console logs: https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=79518 gNewSense guys also suffer from hypocrisy: for example, they push as "free" documentation that requires keeping possibly false blabbing that's irrelevant to the documentation, and can't be printed/etc without advertising on both covers. (Actually, even Debian includes some non-free licenses in main: GFDL forbids chmod -r or locking your server room (a door key might be 6000 years old technology, but the GFDL wording sounds clear to me). Or, Affero licenses which forbid an IMAP server or steganography.) Meow! -- An imaginary friend squared is a real enemy. _______________________________________________ Dng mailing list [email protected] https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng
