Gobuntu
The geeks have been writing about Gobuntu recently, an Ubuntu variation which only installs free software. On the face of it, that’s an awesome prospect – an Ubuntu which by default has nothing installed which is nonfree. However, it’s far from perfect.
The installer is text-only, which is enough to scare new users away. Forget the fact the XP installer is text-only to begin with and is thus just as scary, or the fact that a text-based installer will run much faster, gui installers keep people happy.
Once Gobuntu is installed, there is nothing to stop proprietary software from being installed. The sources.list which Ubuntu computers use to get their software lists from includes multiverse and universe, and there’s nothing to alert you before installing any of this non-free software – something based upon apt-listbugs would be a wonderful addition.
Gobuntu-desktop is simply an Ubuntu package, and so doesn’t have the free software that we need to replace the commercial software included within Ubuntu. We really need to see IceCat/IceWeasel 3.0 and Icedove appear in the Ubuntu repositories, and it really shouldn’t be hard to pull in the Debian version of IceWeasel or the Gnu version of IceCat. I’m currently having to run IceCat from a downloaded .deb file from Gnu and Claws Mail until Ubuntu can solve this.
So in reality, it makes sense for most users to stick to their favourite Ubuntu variation and then use the vrms package to search for non-free software installed on their machines. Whilst vrms fails to find some non-free packages, and knows nothing about software not installed through package management, it’s stable and easy to use.
kaerast@bennet:~$ vrms
No non-free packages installed on bennet! rms would be proud.
kaerast@bennet:~$
There’s also a wiki page for tracking non-free software in Ubuntu’s main repository and thus not detected as non-free by vrms.
Of course it’s also up to the individual user where to draw the line between free and non-free and by how much it’s ok to sell out when something free can’t do the job (I’m very much missing the ability to play flash videos at the moment.) Are patents with source code more or less evil than commercial binary-only software? Do you take issue with the non-commercial or share-alike aspects of Creative Commons? Is privacy and security your main concern, or is freedom to tinker? These questions perhaps belong in a separate post, but are important for anybody considering how free they want their computer to be and are something we’ll all disagree on. And if we all disagree on how free a computer system needs to be, any attempt at a free Linux distro is going to be a kludge of mismatched ideals.
11:46 AM | 0 Comments