gNewSense: past 5 years, same nuisance

Once upon a time... Oh no... 5 years ago!
...in the kingdom far far away... Oh no... in my blog!

Yes! That happened exactly 5 years ago, believe it or not. 5 years ago, 31st of May 2011, I wrote my first, and so far the last, review of the distribution supported by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) – gNewSense. That was the version 2.3 released in September 2009.

A new version was released on the 1st of May 2016. It has index 4.0 and name Ucclia. I cannot tell you much about the version name other than it is a name of an asteroid – randomly selected one from a billion?

The documentation says the distribution name gNewSense came from Gnuisance, the RMS's GPG key. Is it true? Or the whole system is just a g-nuisance? Let's check.

When I tried to open the web site of the distribution a couple of weeks ago, the speed of their pages was awful. You could easily wait for 5 minutes before each page opens. Things are better now, though some lags are still there from time to time.

Version 4.0 of this Linux distribution is only available in NetInstall and GNOME options. The ISO image of gNewSense 4.0 GNOME is about 1.1 Gb in size, and you can get it either from several mirrors or via torrent.

If you read the article I wrote five years ago, you learn that I had a long-winded way to get gNewSense Live system running that time. I was a bit luckier this time, although the dd command failed to create a bootable USB stick for me.

The documentation says that Linux users can create a USB stick with the $cat command. However, it does not mention that it should actually be #cat. At least, for my Xubuntu system, neither $cat nor $sudo cat gave me the desired result. They simply stopped with "bash: /dev/sdb: Permission denied" error. But everything worked after switching to sudo su.

So, USB stick with the gNewSense 4.0 GNOME is in the port of my Toshiba laptop. Reboot. Choose too boot from USB. Let’s go!

What is the sense of gNewSense?

Linux is famous for its freedom. Freedom is in its blood, to be precise - in its license.
There are 2 types of free things which are usually considered:

1. Free as beer. Linux OS costs you nothing to license.
2. Free as freedom. Linux OS can be modified by yourself any way you like.

Most distros (apart from chosen few who violate first type) satisfy both criteria. With small exception. There are too many things around us which are covered by non-free (of second type) license. Most famous examples are MP3 decoder and hardware firmware.
How can free lover Tux live with these restrictions? Different teams of developers solve the issue different ways. Some of them include all the necessary stuff into distro, adding necessary legal notes (e.g.Linux Mint). Others split free and non-free software between repositories which user is free to connect to (e.g.Debian). Third type tries to avoid non-free software as a class. These puristic distros may be very interesting.

Today I will tell you about one of them: gNewSense. It is supported by Free Software Foundation as one of few who satisfies strict restriction to use only really free (as freedom) components.
Latest version of gNewSense was released in September 2009 and has index 2.3. It weights just above 600 Mb, which makes it possible to use on either CD or USB.
Let's try both options.