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-   -   LIBRE distro (https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-distributions-5/libre-distro-4175439765/)

remusrm 12-03-2012 12:41 AM
LIBRE distro
 
I am considering moving to a libre distro. What would you recommend to use? I tried FSF gnewsense and is relatively quite old. Could you please give me the pros and cons of this?

TobiSGD 12-03-2012 06:24 AM
Before even considering a libre distro I would test if your hardware will run without proprietary firmware and drivers. On my laptop, for example, running libre is impossible, for one because of the Broadcom WLAN adapter, but also because the free radeon driver overheats my CPU.

The pros of a libre distribution? You are only running free software.
The cons? You are only running free software, limiting yourself to sometimes inferior solutions for ideological reasons.

adamk75 12-03-2012 08:25 AM
Quote:
Originally Posted by TobiSGD (Post 4841693)
Before even considering a libre distro I would test if your hardware will run without proprietary firmware and drivers. On my laptop, for example, running libre is impossible, for one because of the Broadcom WLAN adapter, but also because the free radeon driver overheats my CPU.
Even if you did not have overheating issues with the radeon driver, that driver also uses proprietary firmware.

Adam

TobiSGD 12-03-2012 08:46 AM
Quote:
Originally Posted by adamk75 (Post 4841740)
Even if you did not have overheating issues with the radeon driver, that driver also uses proprietary firmware.

Adam
True, I did not think about that.

remusrm 12-03-2012 11:15 AM
I am using it on IBM R51. On the R61 I used at work the wifi is not detected. The rest is. Considering what you guys have said. I might just give up and use CentOS5.8

remusrm 12-04-2012 12:11 AM
Quote:
Originally Posted by TobiSGD (Post 4841693)
Before even considering a libre distro I would test if your hardware will run without proprietary firmware and drivers. On my laptop, for example, running libre is impossible, for one because of the Broadcom WLAN adapter, but also because the free radeon driver overheats my CPU.

The pros of a libre distribution? You are only running free software.
The cons? You are only running free software, limiting yourself to sometimes inferior solutions for ideological reasons.
Well, even Debian did not detect my wifi card, and some of the other did not detect my wifi, ethernet. I think in a real world this is really not working out.

TobiSGD 12-04-2012 06:36 AM
Quote:
Originally Posted by remusrm (Post 4842213)
Well, even Debian did not detect my wifi card, and some of the other did not detect my wifi, ethernet. I think in a real world this is really not working out.
There is only one reason why Debian is not considered a libre distro: Because the FSF think they make it to easy to install closed and proprietary software using their non-free repository. if you don't activate the non-free repository in your configuration Debian is basically a libre distribution.
If you want to use your wifi, look at the Debian Wiki how to install the drivers for it, most of the time it involves activating the non-free repo.

remusrm 12-04-2012 12:16 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by TobiSGD (Post 4842427)
There is only one reason why Debian is not considered a libre distro: Because the FSF think they make it to easy to install closed and proprietary software using their non-free repository. if you don't activate the non-free repository in your configuration Debian is basically a libre distribution.
If you want to use your wifi, look at the Debian Wiki how to install the drivers for it, most of the time it involves activating the non-free repo.
Actually I did find a zip file with all the non-free firmwares for wifi devices and used it that way. One odd thing was that when probing for ethernet and wifi, the system became unresponsive and took forever to come back. Asked me to install the firmware and I did and yet again was darn slow searching for it on the usb drive. Overall took 45 min to install it with the net install CD. Just too much hasle.

TobiSGD 12-04-2012 02:35 PM
There are "unofficial" CD images with non-free firmware included: http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/un...ding-firmware/


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