So you thought Debian was pretty anal about free software did you? Well you ain’t seen nothin’ yet! Love ’em or hate ’em, but the Free Software Foundation is very serious (and extreme) in their position of what constitutes free software. Although this has alienated some, I think that a certain amount of what they do is necessary because the forces of Evil in the World as pulling just as hard in the other direction. (eg Trusted Computing, DRM, etc) Well, RMS likes to get into quibbles with Linux distros over the fact that they don’t call them GNU/Linux systems when a large portion of important programs (GCC, for example!) come from the GNU project. So, they decided to play on Linux’s turf. (instead of finishing their own kernel, HERD) Using the power of the GPL (which the FSF is in charge of), they forked a Debian/Ubuntu mix of Linux which is 100% free! That’s right, forget the little fights over Firefox/IceWeasel. gNewSense (nuisance? the first part is creative pun on GNU, but the overall word may or may not be what they were looking for) is a Linux distribution where ALL of the software has the sources available. Anything available only in binaries (eg nVidia/ATI drivers) are nowhere to be found!

Aw, our youngest brother is no longer so little.

As you may have heard recently, Debian has a problem with Firefox due to the fact that the artwork is not released under a free license. This is an extension of problems they’ve had with GNU’s documentation and the clause that allows some parts to remain uneditable. So Debian has forked Firefox into IceWeasel. The engine and core program are the same, only the artwork is different.

This has caused a lot of name-calling back and forth between the two camps. Mark Shuttleworth, who’s Ubuntu is based in Debian, posted a reconcilatory post today whereby he called on both sides to respectfully disagree.

Fedora Core 6 comes with Gaim 2.0 Beta 4. Above you can see it together with the new Fedora Core 6 DNA-style background.

As you can see, things have changed quite a bit in the appearance of Gaim. The largest change to the GUI involves the availability which is now set by a bar at the bottom of the GUI. The biggest complaint I have with this setup is that there isn’t an easy way to set one account as away while another is available.

Photo Sharing

Photo Sharing

If you want to know what the glue is that binds our family together, it’s my mother. She has worked tirelessly to ensure that we have built up the relationships we need in our family. Always working, it’s pretty rare to see her just slacking off. But then again, that’s what’s made her the amazing mother she is and the great wife to my father she is. When others were giving up, she was just getting started. She’s the strongest, hardest working person I know. The only person who works as hard as her is my father and that’s why they’ve pulled themselves out from being poor when they first got married to now nearly being business owners!

I realized the Monty Hall PHP program I had written didn’t really have any kind of description of what you should do on the page. So I went back through my blog and found the description and fixed that sucker up. So if you went there in the past and didn’t get what you were supposed to do, go ahead and give it another shot.

I also fixed my blogroll because a bug from Mauricio’s blog had been causing it to choke. That is now fixed as well and you can go ahead and check that page again.