Club Linux Coffs Harbour

Thought I should post links to some of the things we discussed at our last meeting. If you can remember something I've missed, add more in the comments.

Which Distro?

The perennial question of "Which distro should I run?" came up. To my mind the answer depends on three factors: how free the distro is, it's popularity, and how well it fits your needs. The importance you apply to each of these factors is also going to determine your answer.

Linspire is perhaps the classic example of a distribution that disregards freedom entirely, at least anybody's freedom but their own. They even go so far as to encourage you to pay for additional third-party proprietary applications through their Click'N'Run service.

Distros such as Fedora Core and OpenSUSE that started as "community" spin-offs of commercial enterprises tend to have less non-free software than their "enterprise" equivalents.

Debian was one of the first (if not the first) distribution to adopt a formal policy regarding software freedom, however although the Debian Social Contract includes the Debian Free Software Guidelines, it also says that "although non-free works are not a part of Debian, we support their use and provide infrastructure for non-free packages" through providing non-free software package repositories and other services to developers of non-free software for Debian. It's for this reason that the GNU project doesn't endorse Debian.

Ubuntu, as a Debian derivative, has traditionally scored fairly well on freedom, but did itself no favours when it announced that the next version will come with some non-free hardware drivers installed by default, even when free (but less functional) drivers existed. They've since revised that position, thankfully, but still include some proprietary drivers on the installation disk, mostly in the form of binary blobs in kernel modules.

gNewSense is a new distribution which is derived from Ubuntu, removing even these traces of non-free software. For this reason it tops the distressingly small list of completely free GNU/Linux distributions on the GNU project's website.

Popularity is notoriously tricky to measure when in most cases there is not a one-to-one ratio of sales of installation disks to installations. DistroWatch.com's page hit ranking statistics is one often-cited measure, but it can't really be said with any confidence that the visitors to DistroWatch.com are a representative statistical sample.

As for the distro that best fits your technical requirements, well...

You could read a lot of reviews, but few reviews go far beyond the installation process. Asking the question on a mailing list or forum usually leads to an unhealthy holy war. Wikipedia tends to have a pretty balanced over view of the pros and cons of each. Any helpful links anybody?

The Linux Foundation

Venerable talk shops the Free Standards Group (FSG) and the Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) have merged to form the Linux Foundation. Not sure I see the sense of two organisations with such broad objectives tying themselves to the "Linux" trademark. As I found while looking something up during the meeting, indispensable resource LinuxPrinting.org also has a new online home there.

Running Windows Games on GNU/Linux

Your best bet seems to be Cedega which, although based on Wine, is proprietary software.

Linus' Latest Dummy Spit

Robert mentioned this story about Linus Torvalds irritation with the lack of configurability in the GNOME desktop environment (and specifically in the printing dialog). Linus has just submitted a few patches to GNOME to add the functionality he wants, and has effectively dared the GNOME project to reject them. Most reports seem to end on the note of "at least he did something instead of just complaining", but fail to observe that he has done something, which in Torvald's own words "took me a few hours", over a year after his initial complaint that GNOME thinks that "users are idiots", cross-posted to multiple mailing lists for maximum volume.

Far from a warm and fuzzy story about the primacy of "the code", this seems to be more evidence that Torvalds prefers to engage in debates with the rest of the free software and open source communities from the high ground of the headlines.

Last year Torvalds and other Linux (i.e. kernel) developers criticised version 3 of the GNU General Public License in the press and in "position statements", even though the drafting process for the license they were criticising was then in it's very early stages, and even though they had steadfastly refused (and continue to refuse) to participate in the drafting process. Torvalds even asserted that "The FSF doesn't even seem interested in any feedback", despite the fact that he, you, or I can comment on the current draft using software specifically designed for the GPLv3 drafting process here, and few others are complaining about this process.

Australian Free Software Luminaries

To be sure, the free software and open source communities have their fair share of lively, eccentric characters. You can get acquainted with some of the many leading lights in this country via Planet Linux Australia.

One of the livelier is Jeff Waugh. He's been, among many other things, a leading figure in GNOME over the years (one of the first to respond - politely - to Linus' outburst above), until recently an employee of Canonical where he nursed Ubuntu through it's first formative years, an active member of the Sydney Linux Users Group, an organiser of linux.conf.au 2007, and presumably because he got bored, co-developer of the software that runs "Planet" sites like the above.

I saw Jeff's unveiling of GNOME 2.0 some years ago at a SLUG meeting, and I was instantly sold on the simpler, more elegant, less crack-smoking, technical philosophy that GNOME had adopted and that Linus Torvalds objects to so strongly. Jeff is an awesome salesman (I mean that as a compliment), and a very effective evangelist for software freedom.

The FLOSS Weekly podcast has just published it's interview with Jeff, recorded late last year, and it's a fun and interesting conversation. I can recommend FLOSS Weekly to both newbies and the more technically inclined. It seems to be targeting both geeks and suits, so it's a nice blend of introductory and in-depth stuff. Also check out their interviews with the dangerously eccentric Jeremy Allison of SAMBA (and until recently, Novell - an interesting story), and Eben Moglen of the Free Software Foundation on the GPLv3 story so far.