>The goal you perceive as important gives light to the route to take. I
>think that you perceive this as a pep talk. Nevertheless, it is the way
>to see your problem so that you don't "run nowhere fast".
>
>When you manifest your interest in installing a distro that uses
>non-free software it shows that you do not want to make a real effort to
>be free and boycott those that want to capture others' freedom. Your
>actions show that you are interested on being free and on stopping to
>contribute to non-free oligarchies as long as it does not involve not
>using certain functionality of your hardware. Correct me if I am wrong.
>Anyway, I will try to help you.
>
>You have published your lspci:
>jsebean@jsebean-E1-510:~$ lspci | grep VGA
>00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation ValleyView Gen7
>(rev 0c)
>
>As h-node asks details on your hardware, there is no way to know if your
>problem is for reverse engineering or configuration. You have not
>published that data. You only say it was not on h-node. If you publish
>the detail on your device with lspci we can give you the help you seem
>to think we are not providing:
>lspci -s 00:02.0 -vmmnn
>That is what h-node asks. If you can give us that information and the
>result of:
>dmesg | grep -i firmware
>as I have asked you before, we can tell you what is the next step to
>take (from the freedom perspective).
You seem to think I do not care about freedom and free software which is like
putting words in my mouth. That's what offends me because you make it sound
like I'm willing to sacrifice my freedom for convienience which I do not want
to do. The reason I was here was because I wanted a free software OS. What is
wrong with me trying to use a Distro that is non-free and try to make changes
to it so that it is free? Is that not what Trisquel is? Didn't they take
Ubuntu, remove non-free parts and made their own distro out of it? I need a
"cutting edge" system as someone on here said, newer than Trisquel, I am just
disappointed why the free software movement cannot have a more "cutting edge"
system like Ubuntu is, but without the non-free software. I thought I could
install ubuntu 14.04 and simply not run Non-Free software and have a system I
knew was free.
That said after I installed Ubuntu I realized it was harder than I thought it
would be since they have non-free parts in the regular repos. I thought their
repos were devided up better than that, like how Debian does it. Since
they're not, I uninstalled it. Instead, I installed Debian.
Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but Debian is 100% free software in it's based
install as long as you use the main repo, there are no non-free blobs in it's
kernel, nor are there any other non-free drivers or software. Thus, Debian is
a 100% free software OS by default. The only reason the FSF does not support
Debian is because they have the contrib and non-free repos, and some parts of
the OS suggest you use it in some cases. I know the FSF cannot suggest Debian
because of this as it can lead to people to enable such repos and use
non-free software, as it's a temptation and it can cause confusion, but
because I am aware of the issues I choose *not* to enable the repos and I
ignore these suggestions (I didn't get any but for example, flash player
suggestions in Iceweasel). I know it's not perfect, but you cannot tell me
it's as bad as running Windows. It's all I can use to use free software, and
it is 100% free software, which makes me happy. If Trisquel (or Gnewsense)
was based on something more modern like Debian Jessie then this probably
wouldn't be a problem.
I know Jessie is testing, but it seems stable enough for me to use.
So I installed Debian Wheezy. It does not have an EFI boot loader and my PC
has no legacy boot option, so I had to put one in myself that I copied from
Trisquel's image. (Which makes things hard for people who are not too tech
savy, it means people with modern hardware are helpless to switch, which is
what I was complaining about). I had to type a lot of GRUB command just to
get the installer to boot which was annoying. Once I installed Debian, again,
Xorg wouldn't launch just like Trisquel as the system was too outdated. (Old
Xorg and Kernel was 3.2). I changed the repos to jessie, did a dist-upgrade.
I do not have contrib. I do not have non-free. I am now running Debian Jessie
after a lot of hacking, and I now have Xorg running with full 3D acceleartion
with 100% free software. You wont find any non-free software on my machine
now.
Anyway, here is the lspci output:
Slot: 00:02.0
Class: VGA compatible controller [0300]
Vendor: Intel Corporation [8086]
Device: ValleyView Gen7 [0f31]
SVendor: Acer Incorporated [ALI] [1025]
SDevice: Device [0845]
Rev: 0c
The thing that frustrates me is I find a lot of the other FSF approved free
software distros do not make it easy to install. Debian was the easiest I
could get, I am not a developer, only a hobbiest. All of my hardware runs on
free software, the graphics and the Wifi module (atheros and intel), but
there is no FSF approved OS that easily works with this hardware as it's
"cutting edge". This cuts off a lot of people from switching. If someone like
the FSF would back a true free software system based on something with newer
software, like one based on Debian Jessie, then I would know it would get
lots of support because it a.) would be modern with good hardware support,
and b.) would be backed by a big orginzation. I think it would be nice if the
FSF would do that, it would make life easier for a lot of non-techies and
people like me who barely knows what they're doing.
So with that said, I think Parabola would probably work since it's based on
Arch, but I do not have it downloaded. I may try it later, but Debian seems
to be running nicely now :)
