Tim Dobson's Blog

Is gNewSense suitable for those moving from something a completely non-free?

Should usability compromise digital freedom to win users over?

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Matt Lee wrote:

> gNewSense 2.0 should be able to work on 99% of people's machines.

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I have been unwilling to get involved with this debate [which is currently in progress on Manchester Free Software Group's mailing list] from an argumentative perspective, because it seems to me that the whole debate revolves around a perception of gNewSense and in general, not experience.

I have had relatively little experience with gNewSense, so I resolved to try and bring something constructive into the the area, rather than debate points where people are going to sharpen their claws and cause each other discomfort.

I have had a gNewSense 2.0 livecd lying around for a while, I have briefly used it to test something on my machine but not for an extended amount of time.

I decided to try to use it (as a live cd) on my desktop system.

The hardware on my system wasn't really very glamorous:

Intel CPU
768mb RAM
2x CD/DVD
2 network adapters (one onboard)
2 sound cards (one onboard)
old nvidia graphics card.

My current OS is Gobuntu Hardy, in theory relatively similar to GnewSense 2.0.

The system booted from the livecd fine, except that as usual, it dropped me in some horribly high resolution.
Ubuntu does that too.
Damn mildly powerful graphics cards and monitors! :P

That is to say: ALL MY HARDWARE WORKED.
(except graphics acceleration which I didn't want anyway)

I decided to try some things that the average person might want to do:
I fired up Epiphany, the default browser, the homepage was gnewsense.org, I decided to check that my sound card was working and so looked for an mp3 file I could use as a test.
I downloaded an mp3 from jamendo.com and totem popup with a thing asking me if I wanted to install the codec, I was bemused to see it asking me if I wanted to install a restricted thing. At the time, I found this highly amusing, however, a little research found that Gstreamer is of course free software, albeit with patent issues in the USA.
After I installed the codecs (the process was the same on a Ubuntu machines) I was able to play the file.

It played through my sound card, not my onboard sound. I have had some problems with Ubuntu getting things to play exclusively through this sound card, resolving to blacklist the driver module for the onboard sound card on startup so it configured everything with the "real" card.

gNewSense used the PCI card right from the start, which made me happy. I did not investigate whether it would play using the onboard chip as I had not time or effort to work out how to disable the PCI card to make the onboard card default. It is conceivable, though unlikely, that there is not a free driver.

I then grabbed a video from archive.org, again it asked me to install a package, again I did this, and the video played as expected.

I knew mail & word processing things would work but tested them anyway.

I was at this point at a slight loss of what to do next, however I decided to investigate and document the place where free software is arguably the most flaky.

I fired off Epiphany and zoomed off to Google Video, whereupon I noticed something which could have been done better - Gnash could be installed by default.
As it was, it showed helpful place holder text - "click here to install plugin".

I clicked. I clicked repeatedly.
I double clicked.
I tried clicking gently, I tried clicking hard.
You guessed - nothing happened.

I decided to have a go at installing stuff through Synaptic, the traditional way of installing programs. I little confused by which of the Gnash packages with "plugin" in would work with Epiphany. In the end, I installed them all and something seemed to have worked, for when I restarted Epiphany I now had Gnash.

I'm not going to talk about gnash now, I feel I have already laid out the issues surrounding flash and free software in my previous blog post about Flash and free software.

However, gNewSense does offer the scripts, clive, youtube-dl and metacafe-dl. For those who prefer GUIs I recommend PyTube, as mentioned in my previous blog post, which, despite being free software, isn't available in Ubuntu or gNewSense. Yet.

Next I decided to test Java - aka IcedTea, installed again via synaptic, I was testing this for Java applet games on miniclip.com and most seemed to work.
The only other Java applet I can think of, the multiple photo uploader on Facebook, I know not to work with IcedTea (I can't understand why - it has to be the most simple Java thing in existence!)

For those who were unaware, IcedTea works nicely with Azureus, though gNewSense includes Transmission by default - the GTK torrent client.

At this point I really didn't know what else I could do, I considered testing whether my generic webcam worked with gNewSense (it works with Gobuntu), however I figured I didn't want to sound cocky by saying "It *even* detects my webcam!", so you can still speculate about whether something will work. :P

The thing which I found most troublesome with gNewSense was the integration into Epiphany.

I hope that the GNUzilla project releases an Icecat release of Firefox 3, in my opinion, this would be extremely beneficial. However, if this proves to be too timely I would suggest that better integration between Epiphany & Synaptic to grab those plugins would be something really useful.

I hope this has been mildly useful. I have tried to write this in the most unbiased way as possible, to leave you to make your own decisions, however, in all seriousness, you would do best to try it on your own system and make your decisions that way. :)

www.gnewsense.org

Freedom 10/10
Usability for tested Tasks 9/10

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This was first posted on Manchester Free Software Group's mailing list.

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Thanks to Simon Ward and others for assisting with reformatting & proof reading.