Re: [Fsuk-manchester] Manchester Anarchist Bookfair, 7th June 2008

[Tim Dobson]

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

I have been unwilling to involved with this debate from a 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 which are likely to sharpen peoples teeth and cause 
miscomfort.

I have had a gnewsense 2.0 livecd lying around for a while, I've briefly 
used it to test something 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 isn'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.

system booted from livecd fine, except, that as usual it dropped me in 
some horribly high resolution. Ubuntu does that too. Damn good graphics 
cards & 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, I found this highly amusing 
however, a little research found that Gstreamer is of course Free 
Software, albeit with patent issues.
After I installed the codecs (the process is the same on 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 soundcard, resolving to blacklist the driver module for the 
onboard sound card on startup so it configured everything with the 
"real" card.

gNewSense used the card from the word go, which made me happy, though I 
did not investigate whether it would play using the onboard chip as I 
had not time or resources to play work out how to disable the PCI card 
to make the onboard card default, though 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 would work but tested them anyway.

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

I fired off epiphany and charged 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 tired clicking 
gently, I tired clicking hard. You guessed - nothing happened.
I decided to have a go at installing stuff through synaptic, and was a 
little confused by which of the plugins of gnash would work with 
epiphany, however, 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: 
http://www.blog.tdobson.net/node/168
However, gNewSense does off the scripts, clive, youtube-dl and metacafe-dl.
For those who prefer GUI's I recommend PyTube, as mentioned in my blog 
post, which, despite being GPL, isn't available in Ubuntu or gNewSense.

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!)

For those who were unaware, icedtea works nicely with Azureus, though 
gNewSense includes transmission - 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 something. :P

The thing which I found most testing 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 tired to write this as 
unbiasedly 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. :)

Freedom 10/10
Usability for test Tasks 9/10

Tim

--
www.tdobson.net
----
If each of us have one object, and we exchange them, then each of us
still has one object.
If each of us have one idea, and we exchange them, then each of us now
has two ideas.   -  George Bernard Shaw