A review on linux and BSD... looking for the best free OS

"À la recherche de la liberté perdue"

or...

"Looking for a free OS for my laptop"

Pau Amaro-Seoane, 15/ Mar/ 07, Berlin (pau-at-ippimail.com)

Introduction

I have been using GNU/Linux since 1996 with desktops and laptops without dual booting (no M$); i.e. for eleven years and I am surprised to find that I am not bored yet.

However, I have changed the distro very frequently since I got for the first time a laptop and got the superuser promotion. Since then one thought has been humming in my head... "what is the best free OS?"

I am the happy owner of a Fujitsu Siemens Lifebook P7010:

    * 1.2 kg
    * two batteries: the laptop is capable of stand-alone operation for 6 hours
    * doesn't get hot
    * quiet
    * crisp wide screen 10.2"
    * 80GB disk + 1GB RAM

For this system I have been out there in the wild bit 1/0 word searching the for a free (open source, at least) OS with

    * a good terminal with draggable tabs (this is very important to me)
    * a good wm (say, GNOME, even if it's not just a wm but a desktop env.)
    * lots of free software
* laptop support, if possible (suspension, hibernation)

I will report to you here on this adventure and my concludions. Sit down, grab a cup of coffee and take your time. This will be a long journey through the burdensome, challenging, abstruse, baffling and even bewildering ways of postmodern ethics and self-questioning.

Disclaimer

I happen to be a person who appreciates the point of view regarding freedom that some people like Richard Stallman or Theo de Raadt have. Of course these two points of view diverge when on closer examination. Hard-core BSD advocates will stone you if you mention the magic word GPL but in any case, RMS and Theo share one thing: The code you use should always be open.

You should always be able to look into the software that is driving your wlan card, you probably want to check out the code itself, improve it, be sure there are no security holes in it etc.

This view may not be shared by all people, and I understand it. You must also understand that, for instance, firmware issues "are not as bad" as a kernel with blobs on it. After all, firmware controls a device, just as all the ROMs in your box, and cannot cause as much trouble as can an opaque binary embedded in the middle of your kernel, the heart of your OS.

This review focus on one thing: Freedom (as in "open source", at least, again) in the GNU/Linux and *BSD operating systems. If you cannot be bothered by these issues because you are satisfied with the performance of your wlan card, fine, but stop reading here. You'll be probably very bored.

Of course, even though this page is hosted by my home institute, I am the only one responsible for it (even if I am not much sure about that... mmmh). At least I declare myself responsible for the contents of this page.

Some people have told me that they felt bad when they read this "article" (I'd call it rather "open thought") because they had the feeling I was criticizing them for using Ubuntu. This is totally wrong. I, by no means, would ever criticize anybody for using this or that OS. If I am criticizing anybody here, then it's Ubuntu itself, but not its users.

By the way, this article (the text, I mean, some pictures may be subjected to different licenses except for the last one, embedded in the last box, which I made myself) is published under the Do What You Want To Public License (a polite version of the WTFPL, just substitute the F with an empty space).

Prelude:

GNU/Linux and binary blobs
or
"A brave blobby Gnu-less linux Ubuntu world"

Recently a post of Linus Torvalds made me think about what is going on in the GNU/Linux world -even if he doesn't like it it IS GNU/Linux and not only Linux, a mere kernel- and the casualness that a lot of distros have towards including blobs in their sources.

First of all we should maybe make things clear. What is a binary blob?

"A binary blob is a term used by some open source developers to describe an opaque binary object for which no source code is available. In some operating system communities, such as those of Ubuntu and OpenBSD, the term refers to partial or complete drivers provided by companies such as ATI and NVIDIA to provide support for their hardware. Such blobs can be a point of conflict between open source and free software advocates and developers and regular users of the operating system, as binary blobs can provide convenient support for popular hardware at the cost of the ability to read and modify, and thus control, all of the operating system.

The OpenBSD project has a notable policy of not accepting binary blobs into its source tree, citing not only the potential for undetectable or irreparable security flaws but also its encroachment onto the openness and freedom of their software. (...)"

-taken from Wikipedia on binary blobs

Blobs are bad, very bad for you. They do not only take away your freedom, they

may contain bugs that are "workarounded", not fixed
may be unsupported by vendor at any time
may not be supported, fixed, improved not audited
depend on a particular platform
are very frequently bloated

The well-known, even famous Ubuntu is not free.

This has been true for a while (e.g. firmware embedded right in the linux kernel), but it's going to probably become a trend in the future releases.

I was very impressed by Ubuntu when it popped up for the first time: almost everything worked straight out of the box. More importantly, it seemed to be something promising... GNU-less Linux for human beings:

"The Ubuntu community is built on the ideas enshrined in the Ubuntu Philosophy: that software should be available free of charge, that software tools should be usable by people in their local language and despite any disabilities, and that people should have the freedom to customise and alter their software in whatever way they see fit.

These freedoms make Ubuntu fundamentally different from traditional proprietary software: not only are the tools you need available free of charge, you have the right to modify your software until it works the way you want it to. "

That was the past. The present (so to say) is this post by Mark Shuttleworth (in reply to "A big thank you to the Ubuntu Technical Board").

"Jonathan, I'm afraid you've misread the announcement that proprietary video
drivers will not be switched on by default in Feisty. ... During the
discussion, we re-affirmed the Ubuntu policy of including proprietary drivers
where these are required to enable essential hardware functionality.
(...)
The canonical example has always been wifi drivers, some of which only come in
proprietary blobs, but which of course enable huge parts of the free software
stack to Just Work. We have always shipped those, and intend to continue to do
so.
(...)
The big discussion has been about whether or not 3D video functionality would
be considered essential for Feisty. I and others do believe that 3D is an
essential part of the modern desktop experience. However .... Neither Compiz
nor Beryl have the requisite stability and compatibility to be a default option
in Feisty. It was this which blocked the decision to enable proprietary video
drivers by default, not an aversion to their inclusion"

Ubuntu has been running really nicely on the laptop and I have enjoyed it a lot. But I started to think that a change was becoming urgent in due to all these issues.

I like freedom (that's my personal taste, of course) because it has brought me the world of Unix (in the specific flavour of GNU/Linux, which is System V), and I should want it to stay free (either in the System V form or BSD one).

In my humble opinion
this is a matter of black or white, yes or no, one or zero.

If you allow the ATI/NVIDIA binary blob today, tomorrow you'll start asking for a binary of Internet Explorer and Photoshop and to remove the xterm because nowadays everything is a matter of clicking a mouse and... actually the Novell guys made it fine when they made their compact with Beelzebub, the Evil One. No, no, no, no, no...

To understand why this should be a "NO", go read this

OpenBSD 3.9 release lyrics: "Blob!"

It's a funny way to learn why those nice little binary blobs will become a danger when they grow up. "Oh, c'mon, it's just the driver for my wireless, I need it. Otherwise my laptop is 100% free" That's the kind of argument I hear very commonly. But that's not the solution, I think.
The solution is to buy free hardware. Go and buy Taiwanese if you need your wireless chip to work, as Theo de Raadt says

"I think the biggest success is that most Taiwanese vendors give us documentation almost immediately. A little while ago we even had one (JMicron) contact us completely out of the blue, with full documentation and hardware."

I will try to give you here an overview of my personal experience with a few OSes I have been trying since I jumped out of the GNU/Linux distro I have been using for a while, Ubuntu. I hope you can profit in some way from it. The OSes I have tried are

Of course I tried many more but I will focus on this list because in my opinion it's representative of what you can find out there. For instance, I also gave Mandriva Metisse a try, as well as Ulteo etc etc but, again, I think it's better to limit the scope of my examination to this list for succinctness, for these OSes are good representative.

The question I will try to address in this page is:

Which OS of this list is free, robust, fast, nice, showy
and compatible with my laptop hw and my sw needs?

That's a a bit of a question... I had to wait until Christmas to have some time to play around with some new distros I had never touched. My first choice was

OpenBSD

I have been dreaming of installing this one for years.

OpenBSD has a good reputation

   1. Secure: To mention only two features, Packet Filtering (PF) and securelevels
   2. Rock solid (GENERIC) kernel (which you should not touch if you're asking
  questions in the misc@openbsd.org mailing list)
   3. A professional (I mean mature) Unix-like system
   4. Theo de Raadt is a committed freedom defender

Last time I had some problems with the ftp install, since I did not want to buy the CDs until I was sure I fancied the OS. The laptop would just freeze during the install and playing around with boot options would not help in my case.

The laptop was a very cheap one and I had a lot of problems with other things. Never buy a cheap laptop. It will be more expensive than very expensive laptops in the end, when you consider the time you spend standing in the queue to complain and have it repaired for the nth time.

Anyway... this time the installation was a breeze. If you're planning dual boot it will be a bit trickier when it comes to the cylinders, headers, sectors (CHS) thing, but -as you may already have guessed- I am an "all or nothing" person and I took the whole hard disk for o'bsd.

You slice your system, answer a couple of questions, select the X packages and there you go, o'bsd is installed. I do not know why people are so afraid of giving o'bsd a try; the installation was much easier than the first time I installed GNU/Linux on a laptop, back in 1996... my, that was difficult!

When you have installed it you're sitting in front of a login prompt. If you're planning to use it for something else, maybe you want a bit more of candy, just type startx and there you go: A desktop for you. Nonetheless, if you do not like the default wm, which is fvwm, you may want to install additional packages...

Packages in o'bsd

I'm making an extra section here because it deserves it. Packages in o'bsd are not just binaries ready to be installed on your box. These are binaries that have been patched by the o'bsd people to improve both performance and security.

Have a look at the packages site. You'll find things of the kind "gconf-editor-2.10.0p2.tgz". This p2 means it has been patched two times. Usually developers are more than satisfied when the programme they're writing it's working and then they release it.

O'bsd developers not.

They go through it once, twice, sometimes even three and more times and improve its performance and security. By the way, I forgot to mention that in o'bsd it's all about paranoia and freedom. When you say aloud

"Only two remote holes in the default install, in more than 10 years!"

you can bet a lot of people are going to try to show you wrong. That's the best way to draw the attention of potential attackers. So that they have to be sure their system IS secure.

Installing packages it just a mere pkg_add thing once you've defined the ftp site path with a statement like export PKG_PATH in your .zshrc (actually zsh is not shipped in the default install, but .kshrc or .profile, .bashrc will do it).

You can imagine that all this paranoia gives a lot of work. This results in having a collection of packages that is not the bleeding edge of what you can find in the GNU/Linux world sometimes. Also, the variety of software offer is not... infinite. My window environment (rigurously speaking "desktop manager") of choice is GNOME and these are the first bad news...

In o'bsd (4.0) they're stuck to 2.10 and this means that the terminal has no draggable tabs. I am used to have a dozen or so tabs opened when I am working and it's extremely convenient to drag the 12th tab to the 2nd place or the nth to the (n-3)th place. This can seem to be a minor thing but when you get used to draggable (I apologise for my horrid English) tabs you can just not forget about it.

That said, please remember that you can always also run GNU/Linux binaries on o'bsd, if you wish. As a matter of fact, and just to practise a bit, I installed the GNU/Linux skype binary on the o'bsd box because I was sure nobody before me would have tried such a silly thing (skype is very probably a big HOLE in the security of your system and it is a closed programme).

I wanted to be on my own and after a while I succeeded, as you can see in the picture of the link. The buddy list is empty because I do not use skype; I don't like their way.

Putting it into words of Olivier Meyer, from the misc mailing list of OpenBSD (when I mentioned this):

Skype is completely closed source, and the developers have admitted that the
only reason it is not open source, is because the security is too weak. See
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/06/15/voip_and_skype/page3.html
and look at the bottom:
"Would he[Niklas Zennstrom, co-founder of Skype] make Skype open-source?
No - that would make its strong 1024 bit encryption and security vulnerable:
"We could do it but only if we re-engineered the way it works and we don't
have the time right now."
This is merely security by obscurity. According to a security analysis
presented at BlackHat, the code is protected with many layers of obfuscation
and encryption, intended to prevent reversing.
Here is relevant sections of the EULA(http://www.skype.com/company/legal/eula/):

4.1 *Utilization of Your computer.* You hereby acknowledge that the Skype
Software may utilize the processor and bandwidth of the computer (or other
applicable device) You are utilizing, for the limited purpose of
facilitating the communication between Skype Software users.

So, basically, you accept the fact that Skype will use any and all resources
to "facilitate communication". How does anyone know that there is not a
backdoor that can bes used to access any machine running Skype.

This was an exercise for me and I was happy to get it running. That's it. I use ekiga.

Ports in o'bsd

The ports tree, ports or whatever you call it, is an idea the o'bsd people adopted from FreeBSD. You'll find a lot of things in the /usr/ports tree which cannot be included in the packages due to lack of time, copyrights etc.

There is no difference between building a port and installing a package, the packages are made from the ports. The misc mailing list discourages the use of ports because they do not wish to answer questions concerning compilation problems.

Also, there is no snag or incompatibility between ports and packages; when you have built and installed a port, you have also installed a package.

To my knowledge, there are no goofy ports in OpenBSD. The packages that are on the distribution CDs are simply those that were judged to be most useful or popular. I think if you go to the ftp site you'll find all ports there made into packages, except for those few which cannot be distributed by ftp for copyright reasons.

Documentation and philosophy (again)

Another excellent feature of o'bsd is its documentation. They take it seriously and you can certainly be sure the man pages are always updated and intelligible, almost always with examples and very detailed.

In most of my GNU/Linux boxes I always ended up googling (more recently clustying, actually; I have started to put google in the same drawer with M$ of my taxonomy desk) for what I was trying to do; in o'bsd I type man bla and I get all information I can need and more. For instance, when you try to find out what the heck is going on with your intel wireless chip and the connection over the iwi driver, you get

(...)
FILES
     The driver needs at least version 3.0 of the following firmware files,
     which are loaded when an interface is brought up:

           /etc/firmware/iwi-bss
           /etc/firmware/iwi-ibss
           /etc/firmware/iwi-monitor

     These firmware files are not free because Intel refuses to grant distri-
     bution rights without contractual obligations. As a result, even though
     OpenBSD includes the driver, the firmware files cannot be included and
     users have to download these files on their own. The official person to
     state your views to about this issue is majid.awad@intel.com

You get the idea and philosophy of the o'bsd community. Majid Awad has got some emails from me.

This is the way you want to go. But they are not blind. Of course if you're in a cul-de-sac and got your laptop with, say, an uncompatible wlan card and cannot give it back, if you found out this trap door too late, you can install the firmware yourself.

It's not just a click away, nor there is a please-remove-automatixly-my-freedom tool, as in Ubuntu.

But you have to go that way on your own and you'll be alone. Ubuntu has been shipping per default the firmware and blobby linux headers ("loading restricted linux headers", is the message you get in front of your nose when booting the laptop) for the intel chip to make it work for quite a while.

I can understand that you want your wireless working if you run into such a snag (next time please watch out and buy Taiwanese :) ) but your favourite distro shouldn't be including proprietary things per default. That's a wrong thing.

A master piece in the world of OpenBSD is the book Absolute OpenBSD

Michael W. Lucas has a nice style and you'll find yourself reading thorough sections about TCP/IP without being bored to death, which would be the most normal thing in the world. Still, it is not intended to replace the official documentation, but it is a wonderful guide not only to the world of o'bsd but to *nix in general. I bought it, read it and enjoyed almost every section, even if I am not a geek (or maybe I am one? No, I don't think so).

Here it is a must to mention the quality of the OpenBSD mailing lists. Nevertheless, if you become interested in OpenBSD, which I hope and ever want to ask something there, before posting anything please take into account that the people will expect that you've "done your homework", so that posts like "Help! My i386 doesn't boot!" will just be ignored (in the best of the cases)

Why didn't I choose OpenBSD?

That was a difficult decision.

As you may already have noticed I like the philosophy and fundamentals of this very nice and fine OS but my laptop is trapped in the Intel conspiracy and a number of things cannot be set up.

One of them is the wlan chip, which requires the installation of the proprietary Intel firmware. Also, the vbios has to be hacked to get the 1280x768 pixels you can get from this crisp screen with 915resolution. There's a small patch for this too but it doesn't seem to be working in OpenBSD (which is not a problem since 915resolution does the job). Also, as mentioned, the obsolete GNOME packages were a problem in my case.

Many out there will say:

"Then just get fvwm or something similar and forget about gnome"

Well... I have tried hard. fvwm was out of the question because there is one thing in life I need: namely tabbed terminals; what's more, tabbed terminals which you can drag. I daily use some 8-9 terminal sessions and I do not feel like having them all scattered around my desktop.

And an important point is aesthetics... Some people will scream that GNOME is too heavy and cpu-hungry... That's not true. And I am not living in the Middle Ages any more. My laptop has 1GB RAM and that's more than enough. You have 128MB? I ran GNOME on a laptop with the same amount of memory and, yes, it felt slower than now, but still it was fine. Now it is more than fine.

----
Side remark: By the way, you may find interesting what Linus Torvalds thinks of GNOME users and developers: idiots and nazis .He might actually be right... in some points. Go read this comment.
----

I see that KDE packages are only one release behind the current status... Why don't I use kde and konsole? Well... konsole in OpenBSD 4.0 is very disappointing. What can you expect from a terminal that doesn't even provide you with bold characters?

And last... and least, OpenBSD doesn't support APM on my laptop (and in this case Fujitsu Siemens is to blame) and ACPI is not yet so well-developed that it can suspend. Maybe in 4.2? ... sigh...

Final remarks on OpenBSD

This review has been written from my point of view, which I got while trying to set up o'bsd on this laptop but in general you should in any case give OpenBSD a try. In any case and even if you have a lot of bad luck like in my case it will not be a waste of time. You will see how the learning curve goes uuuuuuup!

FreeBSD
(PCBSD/FreeSBIE)

After my disappointment due to hardware specs I thought of FreeBSD.

Why? Well... there are quite a few reasons to choose the OS:

It's a BSD (and that implies a lot of good things)
A big community and lots of forums
More modern software than in o'bsd
Last but not least: PF and securelevels
FreeSBIE includes a nice script which allows you to switch TOR on or off

First, I tried the FreeSBIE live CD, which it detected my hw quite well. Since I don't like the wm delivered with FreeSBIE and also wanted to evaluate the installation process in FreeBSD, I downloaded the latest FreeBSD release in the 6x branch. At the time of writing this report it was RC1. There was still one more release candidate before the final 6.2 version, but as of now RC2 has not yet been released and I think they have good reasons for that.

Packages and ports

In FreeBSD the default install will not be as secure as OpenBSD... Asking for a lot of software and what's more (worse?) their latest versions has also direct consequences in the packages repository. To put it bluntly, the programs have not been tested so intensively as in OpenBSD. This is the price you pay when you want to get to the bleeding edge.

PCBSD PBIs

You sure have heard about this innovative package strategy; the so-called PBIs. The revolutionary idea is to tar everything together, including dependencies. These are installed under /Programs and avoids troubles.

I must say "chapeau". But... wait a moment, all packages and libraries in one pbi file? Oh, my God! But this is a waste of space! Come on... how many GB does your disk have?

Why didn't I choose FreeBSD?

Well, I found the RC1 a bit buggy. For instance after having downloaded and installed the firmware evil, I found out that the iwi driver was behaving very strangely. I never succeeded in setting it up and connecting to my point.

Another (personal) disapointment was the fact that the FreeBSD community does not seem to take the issues of documentation and software freedom as seriously as the OpenBSD team does. I also noticed that my laptop needed up to FIVE second to open a terminal. With OpenBSD or Ubuntu this was taking a fraction of a second or less.In general the system was slow.

These things made me abandon the trial of FreeBSD. Hopefully the iwi driver and speed will be fixed in the final 6.2 release (update: 6.2 seems to have fixed this indeed) but the encouragement and detailed documentation to install/ run proprietary things is going to remain where it is, I fear

Final remarks on FreeBSD

If the FreeBSD lads and ladies fix the bugs of this release candidate FreeBSD could make a very nice and fine desktop for your laptop. Regarding freedom, they sure make the way easy for you to renounce it. Including PF and securelevels is obviously a very nice feature.

Fedora Core

I have always tried to avoid the rpm world because of the dependency inferno, but I fancy the idea behind Fedora 6.

It is a 100% free distribution and I gave it a try. Many people would argue that fedora is a kind of beta red-hat distro and used for testing purposes. But they have committed themselves to remain free and give the best out of the rpm world and, I must say, they are verging on perfection!

I was very pleased to see how they have advanced in the last few years (last time I tried it was a long time ago).

The pros are that the distro is 100% free and the default fonts and theme etc are just the nicests I have ever seen on GNU/Linux!

Also, if you like the eye candy, Fedora 6 ships beryl, which will render your desktop using 3D acceleration. You sure have heard of all those spinning cubes...

For me this is a distraction and I do not need it at all. This is my personal opinion. But I like to have compiz on my box to show it whenever I have a MacOSX user around.

The effects are far more impressive than what you can get out of aqua. Fedora 6 has a "desktop effects" entry in the menu, which allows you to switch beryl on and off at will. Taking into account that this is based on a 100% free software system, it is really something the fedora developers whould be rewarded for. This has also some other consequences...

if you are trapped with a centrino wlan card you'll have to solve the firmware issue by hand, which is not just two clicks away.

Fedora 6 uses dynamic linking, which means that it uses prelink. From man prelink (I'm not responsible for the English):

       (...)
       prelink is a program which modifies ELF shared libraries and ELF dynamically
       linked binaries, so that the time which dynamic linker needs for their reloca-
       tion at startup significantly decreases and also due to fewer relocations the
       run-time memory consumption decreases too (especially number of unshareable
       pages). Such prelinking information is only used if all its dependant libraries
       have not changed since prelinking, otherwise programs are relocated normally.
      (...)

And I tell you something: You'll notice the difference.

Sometimes I had the impression that the terminal was popping up before I clicked on the terminal icon! Really impressive. Specially after the five-seconds-delay of FreBSD 6.2 RC1 (see above)

If you ask me about the cons, there were some problems. The installation set an i586 kernel on my centrino machine, which is a well-known bug of fedora and easy to fix but writting "linux i686" on the boot prompt does not help, as they claim. I tried it and still got an i586 kernel. However, this is not a major problem.

The consequences are that whilst booting you'll get the warning that a .ko file was not found. When you look for the file it's there and that file is doing the cpu freq work and you'll hear your fans spinning a lot. Anyway, as I said, fixing it was not an issue.

Another problem was when selecting another repository ("extras") during the installation, as well as setting up the clock. The selection of other repositories would just crash the install and the clock was axiomatically, by definition, cardinally, unquestionably, vitally, willy-nilly, compulsorily wrong after installation. In order to avoid those problems you just follow the defaults of the installation and add extra repositories after the installation and set up the clock correctly.

After I finished the installation and corrected the kernel problem I still had the impression that in general fedora 6 is more cpu hungry than Ubuntu was on the same laptop (without the 3D effects). It gets hot and the fans come up more frequently. I switched off the yum-builddep package daemon which will look for updates every time you log in (a long job) and deinstalled beagle because sometimes it was using up to 65% of the cpu but still I was not satisfied with the ratio of performance to fan noise. Of course this is a minor thing.

To sum up, fedora's biggest bug is called "anaconda". Whilst it'd not a problem for experienced users, it will scare away potential newcomers. It's been a problem for a while now and I think they should fix it as soon as possible because it gives a bad impression of an otherwise excellent distro.

Debian GNU/kFreeBSD

This is something I am very excited about! You have a Debian GNU system on the top of a kernel from FreeBSD with the regular apt-get set plus devfs, OpenBSD PF, jails etc etc.

Why do such a thing? Well, the BSD kernels are rock solid, as you already have read (see above) and (this is of course my personal opinion) the debian tools are heaven. I have never had troubles with apt-get and dependencies and the minor issues were easily fixed.

On the other hand, when you think of a bsd system you think of a single thing. This may sound weird for GNU/Linux users but some people just don't like to have a kernel plus a bunch of applications. In GNU/Linux you can update the kernel and keep the bunch of things as it is. In BSD -in principle- not.

The whole is a thing.

That's what you can expect from a monolithic kernel and a coordinated, synchronized userland. BSD presents a system, not a bag full of parts. Stability will prove elusive if kernel and userland are to be independent; the simple reason is that the kernel, in changing, will necessitate changes in the userland -- suppose a system call is changed or added. So new kernels will be accompanied by new little bits of userland, this time a new loader, next time some new part of the compiler, the time after that, something about a new type of file system... but let's be optimistic... I am looking forward to seeing a stable release!

I gave the latest iso a try and I must say that the installation process was a bit messed up, with a lot of warnings and errors, even if I followed the installation guide carefully. In the end (of course?) I got it to work and was very pleased that could barely find any differences with the most modern GNU/Linux distros in terms of the desktop.

However it is not advised to use it on a production system, even though I felt that it worked very nicely. This Os is very promising. You have the whole deb repository and a promise of freedom:

If you're concerned about running a 100% free system, our commitment to the Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG) guarantees that Debian GNU/kFreeBSD doesn't contain any non-free software. In fact, we have removed some non-free binary-only drivers that are contained in the upstream FreeBSD tree, like the ath driver.

If you want to get more information on this very promising OS, visit their wiki and give the installation cd a try and report about it in the mailing lists.

gNewSense (aka FSF-Ubuntu)

I don't think there's much to say here. gNewSense is an effort from two Irish software developers, Brian Brazil and Paul O'Malley, and it's sponsored by the FSF. Essentially they have taken an Ubuntu release (Dapper), removed the proprietary things out of it (quite a few of them!) and added a new GDM theme. As they say, gNewSense is

A GNU/Linux project, to take all the binary blobs out of a rather popular distribution and make it all free

Why the FSF has decided to sponsor a new distro is totally unclear to me. There are -not that many- some distros around which are completely free and which have been supported and used for many years.

Creating a new one may be a bit confusing for the more than with-too-many-distros-overwhelmed community (please note that I am a member of the FSF). Newcomers may also lose their way... or maybe it's a good idea.

A hard-core OpenBSD user and friend of mine (Dave, "Woodchuck") had the following very interesting comment (in one block, I don't want to edit his comment):

"Again you see the wisdom of the One True Way: BSD. The distributions are divided into three parts: Truly Free (BSD License, "Do what thou wilt"), Enserfed (GNUish: "Do what we demand you do") and Enslaved (Proprietary -- only the hooks to apply proprietary software are present. BSD recognizes that GNUish software is useful and necessary. But OpenBSD in particular strives to get rid of the slavery of the GPLs. So far OpenSSL and OpenSSH have succeeded notably. Also, OpenBSD tries not to use little Gnuish utilities like ls, when there are truly open source ones available from the BSD final releases. (Tahoe, Reno). Gnuish source is isolated in the source tree. Software with goofy licenses (like vim) are not part of the distribution, and must be installed by the user manually or through a port. OpenBSD has just completed a thorough license audit of both the tree and the ports, insuring that the license for each bit of software has been tracked down, the copyright holder verified, and the terms of the license made clear. While this is highly *boring* to do or think about, it is the sort of obsessive paranoid attention to detail that makes OpenBSD both wonderful and terrible at the same time. You will not get a lawsuit by running OpenBSD. You might get one by running Fedora, though. (BSD's major lawsuits were with AT&T/Lucent/Novell/SCO and they are all closed and won -- this delay was why BSD was somewhat delayed vis-a-vis Linux. Actually, the first free Unix for the PeeCee was 386BSD ("Jolitz"), which came out before Linux. Unfortunately it had licensing problems. BSD is "Once burned, twice wary"; Linux has yet to be burned. There is a possibility that Microsoft is thinking about burning Linux."

In any case, it seems that some people are having troubles setting it up, especially the internet connection. I googled a bit when I found out that my gNewSense live cd had not configured my wired ethernet connection and seemingly this is a frequent issue.

It's strange, because it's based on Ubuntu Dapper and Dapper had never a problem at configuring wired ethernet connections and I don't think it's due to the removal of proprietary things.

From the mailing list I also got the impression that they are a bit lost in keeping track of what's proprietary software and what's not. As a matter of fact it's classified as their bug No. 00001.

The verdict: And the winner is...

This is how my "laboratory"-desk looks by now

That's the worst part of this report. I simply do not know. If I was asked what my personal taste is and what my choice would be if I was given a fully compatible laptop, I'd answer without a trace of hesitation: give me OpenBSD right now!. But this is not the point of this review.

What I have tried to answer here is the question:

"You are a normal person, you own a laptop and you want to install something 100% free on it with a good terminal, a good wm, laptop support to suspend it to RAM or to disk and lots of free software. Which OS would you choose among them that have been addressed here?"

I don't know... I am very tempted by OpenBSD but this means I will have to learn to forget about suspending to RAM, which is something I use(d?) daily. In fact, I am so attracted by OpenBSD that if I decide that I cannot live without apm/acpi I will just close my eyes and install whatever works, without paying attention to the ethics the OS follows.

In Spain we say "de perdidos al río", which means "in for a penny, in for a pound", I believe. If I have to renounce the OS of my choice I will take whatever ethical rubbish and install it and wait until either the smart o'bsd developers have come to a solution for ACPI + suspend or until my laptop is so old that I need a new one. Then I will pay attention to the hardware and support.

I should probably have chosen a title for this section like, for instance: "And the loser is..." For this question there is a clear answer: Me. I am the loser because I fell in a hardware booby-trap and I am not free to make my personal choice.

The moral of the story

If you belong to the same species I do and freedom is something you pray for everyday, next time, please, check out that your laptop has 100% free hardware. Otherwise the blobby bogeyman (begeyblob?) will haunt your dreams.

PS:

Just one day after I finished this report I was feeling depressed, dead duck, forlorn and sunk because I was fearing I would have to install the feisty cervid linux on my laptop and after looking and looking and looking I found the solution to (almost) all my problems.

Now I've decided that I can use OpenBSD on my laptop. The answer is named fluxbox and antialiased xterms. I didn't know you can tab almost everything in fluxbox! You can even have, say, six xterms tabbed in one window and tab to that window firefox, if you wish.

My main problem was the tabs and the possibility to drag them around, as I have mentioned before. Well, fluxbox is a synonym of do-what-you-want-with-tabs. GNOME or KDE are far away from that yet. I have decided that I do not need spinning cubes or whirling hoary hedge sus domestica and that fluxbox can look very nice too. But one thing is for sure: I will have to get used to living without suspending to RAM. I think I can do it. I am a happy man now ;)

Bye!

Pau

PS to the PS: A week later I discovered ion, a kind of graphical shell, and I am very happy with it! Since I am always working with maximized windows, use a minimalist window decoration and never use the menus, I was the perfect potential ion user. Here you are a couple of links: ion (review by Teodor Zlatanov, IBM), ion (by Thomas Nemeth) and ion (the home page)

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