Very Open Source

My work-laptop is an Acer TravelMate 6292. It's about three years old now, with a 150GB hard disk, 2GB RAM and an Intel Core Duo 2GHz processor. This week I installed Debian Linux on it. My aim was to have nice clean usable interface with lots of useful apps, but at the same time to stick as much as possible to open source software. Could an operating system be useful, usable and totally free? When I say free, I mean free as in open source; all software and packages referred to here are free of cost.


This guide is the best I found on the Debian installation and additional apps set-up. Other than a message about lacking something needed for my hardware to work properly, the Debian (stable) install went fine. My goals then differed from the guide. I don't do chat and I don't use mail clients. The default windows manager (gnome) is easy to use and I didn't want to complicate things by installing programs designed for kde (the main alternative to gnome) so k3b, amarok and quanta were out. I wanted to stick to only open source software (i.e. only the main repository), so the proprietary multimedia software such as Real Player was out. I took some useful things not in the guide: emacs (a programmable text editor), totem-xine (a movie player that works better than the totem-gstreamer default since the xine back-end supports DVD menus and chapters) and some other stuff (in italics below) useful for maths and stats, including LaTeX which is great for writing anything that includes equations. I installed the following additional packages, all from the main repository.

f-spot filezilla amule vuse gnucash scribus scribus-template audacity banshee mplayer mozilla-mplayer gtkpod xmms2* kino vlc mozilla-plugin-vlc gxine gxineplugin xineplugin brasero gstreamer0.10* bluefish openjdk-6* icedtea-gcjwebplugin totem-xine emacs ess octave3.0 r-base texlive-full texmaker


So what's missing? One proprietary package that will be essential for some is ttf-mscorefonts-installer (in the contrib repository) which installs Microsoft Word style fonts. But this is of less use these days since Open Office provides so-called liberation fonts (liberation serif, liberation sans and liberation mono) which are open source versions of the similarly named Word fonts. For my purposes these are enough: I am liberated.

And at this point I fall. The message I got upon installation was related to the fact that my wireless isn't working. To get it to work I needed a proprietary hardware driver contained in the firmware-iwlwifi package (in the non-free repository). Debian is very strict on open source; the non-free and contrib repositories aren't officially regarded as part of the Debian distribution. This is perhaps why Ubuntu, which is based on Debian (unstable), is now by far the most popular Linux distribution. If you install Ubuntu on my machine, wireless works out-of-the-box, as they include proprietary hardware drivers on install. Newbies often blame hardware problems related to Debian on the fact that the Debian (stable) is older than Ubuntu, when in reality it may be to do with its strict open source policy.


So now everything works. Almost. While the hardware works, the problem with any Linux distribution is that many types of media simply won't play due to proprietary file formats and content scrambling. The two packages essential for any Linux user who watches videos and movies (i.e. everyone) are libdvdcss2 and w32codecs, though their use is technically illegal in some jurisdictions so they won't be in any of the main, contrib or non-free repositories. The guide gives instructions on how to add the (unofficial) Debian-Multimedia repository; you can then download these packages and other proprietary multimedia software. I also use mp3 audio and mp4 video files on a regular basis, which are proprietary file formats. To create (encode) mp3 files in the audio CD ripper I need the gstreamer0.10-lame package from Debian-Multimedia, which for me is essential. I then cheat a little by upgrading all upgradable packages using Debian-Multimedia, which includes an upgrade of ffmpeg, the useful command line utility for audio and video file conversion. I can now use ffmpeg to covert to and from mp3 and mp4 files.


Finally, I've now got an excellent application filled and easy-to-use operating system. I didn't use open source software entirely, but for me there is no getting around the use of firmware-iwlwifi, gstreamer0.10-lame, libdvdcss2, w32codecs and the Debian-Multimedia updates: essential packages with no viable open source alternative. The images within the text show the sound & video, office, graphics, and internet menus; some lesser used apps and apps with desktop shortcuts have been hidden using the menu editor. Clean and simple. I can now hold my open source head high. As long as I hide my Windows NT laptop in the back of the cupboard.