Rob Myers said : > On 09/23/2010 10:52 PM, Bernardo Barros wrote: > >And it is one of the free distros. > >http://www.gnu.org/distros/free-distros.html > >Any chance of this happens for pure:dyne 10.06 ? > >yeah, I know there is an issue with java and processing, but that's all? > > http://www.gnu.org/distros/free-system-distribution-guidelines.html
Sadly, following this guideline I cannot see how Puredyne could get listed. Of course: We do not ship Flash. We do not ship Nvidia or fglrx proprietary drivers. But all this can be installed manually though via apt-get, aptitude, and has been discussed in the past in this list or wiki(s), which is not allowed: "What would be unacceptable is for the documentation to give people instructions for installing a nonfree program on the system, or mention conveniences they might gain by doing so." Also on the issue of nonfree firmware: We do have alsa-firmware, because many sound cards rely on it. We do have linux firmwares, for wireless firmwares and some graphic card firmware (even the _free_ xorg drivers need these to have acceleration working if I understand correctly the current situation with the xorg radeon driver). And as mentionned earlier, we do have sun-java because even though open-jdk works with Processing and co, the web browser plugin, iced-tea, is not able to run Processing applets. Eventually the Java stuff will be solved, not worried about this, but the firmware issue is here to stay and it will always be possible for Puredyne users to get help here or on the wiki on how to get their hardware running when no suitable free alternative exists. For example in the previous wiki, in the ATI/NVIDIA Howto we were explaining the blob issue, why it was a serious problem and pointing to petitions asking these hardware manufacturers to help the community to write free drivers. More on the video issue, in the last Puredyne sprint in Helsinki, Dave and Gabor, were with us and started to work towards full compatibility whenever possible with free drivers for their OpenGL software, fluxus. My position has always been to educate our users without blocking or denying them access to free software simply because they did not even know about such issues when they acquired their hardware in the first place. This has proven to be an effective solution, as many Puredyne users end up checking carefully the specs when they want to buy a new machine or sound card, or even go later on for zero-dollar-laptop DIY solutions. a. -- http://su.kuri.mu --- [email protected] http://identi.ca/group/puredyne irc://irc.goto10.org/puredyne
