FSF-Approved gNewSense 2.0 Released

An anonymous reader writes "gNewSense DeltaH (2.0), a second major release of a GNU/Linux distribution with focus on freedom, has just been released. It is based on Ubuntu 8.04 which was released less than week ago. gNewSense is one of the few GNU/Linux distributions listed as free by the GNU Project."

Re:And why do we need another Distro?

[libervisco]

It's much more than that. You'd be surprised at how careful they are not to ship with a single bit that is not Free Software.

It may seem ludicrous to some at first, but think about the benefit. Even if you wont use it as your main system you can use it to test just how much of your hardware is 100% Free Software compliant, or you can use it to see what hardware you should buy that is 100% compliant.

And Free Software compliant hardware equals best possible experience - since it will all then work out of the box, with bugs fixed and improvements steadily coming, because you don't need to depend on some third party for everything.

gNewSense plays a crucial role.

You can read a bit more about that here http://www.nuxified.org/blog/gnewsense_2_0_a_premier_freedomware_platform_based_on_ubuntu_8_04_lts_released [nuxified.org]

Cheers

Re:I guess I need to RTFA

[Hatta]

This [ubuntu.com] explains it pretty well. In short, gNewSense was first, Gobuntu is official, and they haven't had the time or motivation to merge yet.

Re:!= Gobuntu?

[Keyper7]

Mark Shuttleworth recently declared [ubuntu.com] that Gobuntu was not going so well as he expected because of the lack of community support and conjectured that perhaps it was better if the development team helped the gNewSense team instead. It seems they are doing exactly that now, since the 8.04 folder of the gobuntu download page [ubuntu.com] it's empty.

Re:naming

[gwniobombux]

Initially it was indeed call Gnuisance. From their faq:

4. Why the name gNewSense? The name originated as Gnusiance as a reference to RMS's GPG key, but was later changed to gNewSense by bbrazil and ompaul to also capture the New Sense of the distribution and as a pun on GNU.

Re:Now immortalised in song

[ciggieposeur]

Wow, did you read the same thread I did?

RMS popped in to say in essence that he will not recommend users use OpenBSD (based on the presence of non-free software in their ports collection). Then he got flamed by a bunch of people claiming all sorts of things he didn't say, to which he responded one by one and was quite polite during most of the 30-odd messages I saw.

He said explicitly (multiple times) that he respects the *choice* of end users to use whatever they want to on their own systems. He tried (and apparently failed based on the reaction in the thread) to outline his reasoning with a few analogies, and he politely acknowledged that the stock Linux kernel also fails to meet his definition of free software. In the end, he says his only real power is to not recommend something when people ask, but he respects the right of every project to choose their own ends and means.

How in the world can you see that as hypocritical behavior?