[gNewSense-users] Re: questions about ntfs, w-lan and grub

[Niklas Cholmkvist]

anoglad wrote:
>         Hello awesome freedom supporters,
>         
>         however i can't see windows in the Grub loader. How can i change
>         this?
I think you first need to know what version of Grub you have.
In Synaptic for example I can see a package called "grub-common" and the
version of that one is "1.98~20091212-2". 1.98 is the significant part I
think. I think that version 1.98 is also a "Grub 2" version. You need to
find instructions or some howto regarding Grub 1 or 2 , relating to
which one you have. When I first encountered Grub 2 I was very confused
because the commands I knew for Grub 1 didn't work anymore.

> Which packages do i have to load to be able to use wireless lan with
> my leptop. There is no free software driver (I think), so i'd like to
> use a non-free alternative. 
To not run into this problem of needing proprietary/non-free software I
made the planning and finally made the purchase of a usb-stick which has
'wireless-card' hardware on it which runs with completely(or "as free as
currently possible") floss software. 
I'll add to Aurelien's reply that specifically you need to look at this
page:
http://www.fsf.org/resources/hw/index_html/net/wireless/index_html/cards.html
Personally I have bought the "Netgear WG111v3 USB (Realtek 8187)" model
and I specifically sent the company an email before purchase asking "is
the device really v3(?), because it was not mentioned on your page".
I recieved a positive "Yes it is v3, we have confirmed it", so then I
bought it. If you want I can dig up the exact price I paid for it and
when.

>  <SNIP> if gNewSense could ask the user if he wonna use unfree
>  software <SNIP>
That is what Debian does in the Lenny distribution(I think in more than
just Lenny). I've tried it recently(Debian Lenny, in the hope I would be
able to upgrade it to gNewSense metad) and I was very disappointed that
it listed non-free and contrib in the "software sources" as if there was
nothing bad with that. It gets me the impression that the whole Debian
community isn't bothered at all to install non-free non-floss software.
Also the default Debian Lenny kernel contains non-free non-floss
software. It's not a linux-libre kernel there.

Now this is something more personal:
Do you play any 3D games? Because gaming(in both 2D and 3D) is very
important to me I've been very tempted all this time to use proprietary
3D drivers, and I'm sorry to say that I've made this move and I've not
liked it at all. My new computer which I've ordered has a motherboard
which has the Intel G43 chip, the graphics card which is marketed as
"X4500". So no longer will I be tempted to use proprietary graphics
drivers to play 3D games(which is part of my lifestyle-culture, that is
to play computer games from time to time).(you might not be interested
in this but the whole computer along with screen and input devices cost
~520€). One drawback is that I don't know if Asus(it's an Asus
motherboard) will release specifications so that the bios could
eventually support coreboot, but I floss 3D drivers were more important
for me. What I found out(no, I'm not 100% sure) is that even the
microcode of the X4500 graphics card is documented, although the Intel
GMA is integrated in the motherboard which means that one has to buy a
full motherboard to get these 3D hardware which Intel has floss for.

I hope you don't mind I put you in Cc(carbon copy):

Kind regards,
Niklas
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