Trisquel 7.0 LTS Released, Still Aiming At A More Free Ubuntu

[curaga]

Since you can't make a wireless card on a 3d printer, and can't make it from discrete components from Radio Shack or the dumpster either, that means hardware is never free. It may be more free to use hardware you already have then to buy new hardware in order to be able to use open firmware.

You sure? Cut up a suitably sized antenna, add some parallel port/usb interfacing, do everything on the cpu like good old softmac, I'd think one could do wifi with only rudimentary RF experience.

[Calinou]

I'm still trying to figure out how the kernel that as is claimed in the article blocks certain kernel modules from being loaded is more "free" than the one that doesn't descriminate and lets you run whatever kernel modules you want.

Freedom 0 means you will not be restricted by a license for usage of the software. It does not mean the software lets you do more things technically.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/imperfection-isnt-oppression.html

Since you can't make a wireless card on a 3d printer, and can't make it from discrete components from Radio Shack or the dumpster either, that means hardware is never free. It may be more free to use hardware you already have then to buy new hardware in order to be able to use open firmware.

That said, Trisquel used with such hardware has another, entirely different use case: ultra-high security requiring situations. The example would be handling the take from the next Snowden, where you are explicitly going up against the NSA and NOTHING is trusted absolutely. You can't really get trust that is "turtles all the way down" without making all your own chips, but coreboot, open firmware, and something like Trisquel is probably as close as you can get without owning your own chip fab. Whoever handled that take last time around evidently did things right, by comparison there was a laptop in the Chelsea Manning case used by an outside contact carelessly (disk wiped only with zeroes) that played a key role in her ever being captured.

Freedom is unrelated to price, cost or convenience.

not to remove the blob from your kernel, but to use a WiFi card that requires no binary blob. To my surprise, intel's wireless driver is not free.
What you need is to replace it with a RYF (respect-your-freedom) card or dongle, as explained, e.g., here.

The problem when you use a not-fully-free GNU/Linux distribution is that you support their work and don't support the work of fully free GNU/Linux distributions like Trisquel. You're somehow endorsing it.

[Luke]

2.4GHZ not such an easy RF project

You sure? Cut up a suitably sized antenna, add some parallel port/usb interfacing, do everything on the cpu like good old softmac, I'd think one could do wifi with only rudimentary RF experience.

Actually, to make a modulated communications device (digital or analog) for this frequency is not so easy-ask any ham. Not many conventional discrete transistors work that high. I've seen 2GHZ as the cutoff (current gain crosses unity) frequency for some very, very good small signal transistors. In a wifi card the transistors and the circuits are on a nanoscale and not only do the transistors work well at far higher frequencies but ordinary coil and capacitor tank circuits are used as well-to get ENOUGH inductance and capacitance to make the oscillator circuit work. A discrete component device would probably have to use a Gunn diode in a tuned resonant waveguide like a radar detector, but it would be four times larger than a radar detector's about 1 inch by 1 1/2 inch antenna horn and 1/2 inch to 1 inch wide waveguide due to the lower frequencies used. The 2.4 GHZ is high for conventional circuits and low for X-band style radar design, this hard to miniaturize for a discrete device circuit.

[curaga]

If the issue was only free hardware, and not interoperability, why not pick a lower free-to-use band? Or if laws were no issue, whatever band was convenient

[Britoid]

not to remove the blob from your kernel, but to use a WiFi card that requires no binary blob. To my surprise, intel's wireless driver is not free.
What you need is to replace it with a RYF (respect-your-freedom) card or dongle, as explained, e.g., here.

I have a better solution, don't use a kernel that restricts your freedom to install what you want.

[Luke]

Lower bands would be full and cannot handle wide channels for high data rates.

If the issue was only free hardware, and not interoperability, why not pick a lower free-to-use band? Or if laws were no issue, whatever band was convenient

A wireless card must be able to talk to whatever hotspots it would encounter, thus the frequency decision for a machine used on the road has already been made. Otherwise it's about as useful as an analog TV set where analong TV broadcasting has been discontinued. OK, now let's talk about why you could not use lower frequences in a home network either:

The term "bandwidth" comes from the fact that a modulated carrier becomes "spread out" generating "sidebands" spaced out from the carrier by a distance determined by the modulating frequency. High speed data requires a wide RF band to transmit, thus the interchangeable use of the terms speed and bandwidth. Lower ham bands, empty spaces usable by pirate radio operators, "white spaces" etc are all too narrow to accomodate wide channels for high speed data-or any data taking the form of modulated pulses. A readable pulse requires harmonics up to the 10th harmonic to get the square wave shape we know in computer work, thus multiplying the channel width by an order of magnitude. By the time you are on a band where the channel width is a small enough percentage of the carrier frequency to handle high speed data, you are up where a lot of discrete devices are of limited use.

Hams have put data on lower bands in the past, but at slow speeds to control literal bandwidth. You don't hear much about "packet radio" anymore due to higher speeds of modern Internet connections, though you DO see a lot of computers using Morse code rather than ASCII to run at very slow data rates interoperable with remaining hand-keyed morse code operators! There you see data rates down around 10-40 words per minute, in bandwidth measured in HZ fitting large numbers of signals into tiny channels. You can send a lot of text at that kind or rate, but forget about a web page that would have to be sent as a fax over many seconds on a wider "voice" channel. Packet radio on a voice channel had exactly the same data rate limitations as dialup internet, for exactly the same reasons.

Laws of the FCC can be defied or a ham license obtained, but laws of physics are another story.

[IsacDaavid]

I'm still trying to figure out how the kernel that as is claimed in the article blocks certain kernel modules from being loaded is more "free" than the one that doesn't descriminate and lets you run whatever kernel modules you want.

Linux-libre doesn't do that. Michael Larabel is an expert at cherry-picking out-of-context sayings and triggering misinformation that goes subtly disguised as inclusive journalism, when in fact he's just seeding another forum flamewar. Of course Michael doesn't like free software, GNU, the FSF and distros like Trisquel; he just writes unfavourably about them when he feels like his personal views need a bump.

I used Parabola with Linux-libre from version 3.10 to 3.13 on my laptop computer back in 2nd half 2013, and loading the binary-only firmware to get the bloody Broadcom WiFi chip working was as simple as copying it from its standard Linux location at /lib/firmware/ to my /lib/firmware/. Free software-only distros, just as free software packages themselves, don't exist to make it impossible to run proprietary software nor they want to censor its existence. They simply neither ship nor host nor recommend nonfree software, and they are truly neutral on whether the user wants to voluntarily search and install this nonfree software anyway. Even if Linux-libre purposefully blocked nonfree modules that the user wants to voluntarily run (and no, I'm not confusing firmware with loadable kernel modules), which it doesn't, the fact that Linux-libre is free software renders such an action pointless because free software is giving the user everything he needs to modify the software's behaviour. That's the whole fucking point of free software guys! Calling a piece of free software an "ability blocker" is an outright oxymoron.

that is not free as do whatever you want freedom

It actually is a do whatever you want kind of freedom, with an except limiting others to do whatever they want the software added in the case of copyleft. Linux-libre lets you hack with it as its developers and original authors would do; so you can modify it to load all the proprietary modules you want, or turn it into an assassin robot.

If burned into ROM firmware is OK (even if it is backdoored and kills kittens) and a software loadable blob (which solves world hunger and protects its users privacy) is the devil, then you know something is fishy with the espoused position.

You are confusing different issues, namely freedom, privacy, and what not. We know that FOSS usually leads to secure and private software, but when it doesn't it must be avoided and denounced on the grounds of security and privacy (anyone remember the Unity-Amazon affair?), or even better, make use of the freedom and make it safe. Burned, read-only firmware is acceptable freedom-wise because nobody, not even its developer can change it. Physics don't carry an ethical charge. Whether you like what the firmware and hardware are doing is not a freedom-related issue, and I am pretty sure Stallman agrees that it is OK to reject it based on those grounds.

[IsacDaavid]

I have a better solution, don't use a kernel that restricts your freedom to install what you want.

Then you should stop using computers, because I haven't seen a kernel to this day that is ABI-compatible with all other kernels, which is a clear attack to your right to make a random executable run out of the box. Am I right?

[Sonadow]

Freedom 0 means you will not be restricted by a license for usage of the software. It does not mean the software lets you do more things technically.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/imperfection-isnt-oppression.html

Freedom is unrelated to price, cost or convenience.



The problem when you use a not-fully-free GNU/Linux distribution is that you support their work and don't support the work of fully free GNU/Linux distributions like Trisquel. You're somehow endorsing it.

Software that blocks hardware from working smacks clearly of oppression and not imperfection. Insert a firmware-using WiFi card in a libre kernel and try to load the firmware into /lib/firmware. It will not load. And why? because all references to the firmware blob has been scrubbed out from the driver at the source code level.

Only fools endorse oppressive software like the linux-libre kernel and libre distributions that seek to actively hinder and block users from having a proper computing experience. Those distributions and kernels do not deserve an iota of support from anybody.