The developers behind the Debian Linux distribution are preparing for the upcoming release of Debian 5, which is codenamed Lenny. The decision to move forward with the release follows a contentious vote over whether to permit the inclusion of binary blobs in the new version of the distribution.

A long thread at LXer about whether or not Debian should include unsourced binary blobs in its kernel had some commenters if not exactly singing the praises of totally free GNU/Linux distro gNewSense, then at least humming those praises.

Jack Wallen comments on the debate that’s broken out about the use of proprietary “blobs” in the “free” Linux kernel. How much “free” deserves the seal of approval from the Free Software Foundation? Does the expectation of 100-percent free software make sense?

Even Linux distributions that contain only open-source applications, it turns out, often depend on proprietary firmware. Without binary blobs, common hardware like Atheros and Broadcom-based wireless cards, for example, would not work with distributions like Ubuntu. In other words, almost all of us, whether we realize it or not, still depend on proprietary software in one way or another.

gNewSense is a GNU/Linux project that aims to take all of the binary blobs and non-Free software out of Ubuntu and Debian to make a 100% Free Software distribution.

"Atheros Communications has announced the release of free software wireless drivers for ath9k. The ath9k driver requires no proprietary binary blobs and works on several chipsets and over a dozen wireless devices..."

Add gNewSense as an answer and vote for loading gNewSense on lenovo as the default os.

gNewSense"http://www.gnewsense.org/"
A GNU/Linux distribution, that takes all the non-free blobs out of a rather popular distribution and makes it free.

« With the recent discussion here on proprietary blobs in the Linux kernel, it's nice to see that today Sam Leffler has released the source for the Atheros Hardware Abstraction Layer under the ISC license, which is both GPL and BSD compatible. The Atheros chipset is used in many laptops, so this is another important step towards running a completely free distribution. »

"...I asked around in IRC today and the closest answer I heard so far is:[...] madwifi, because ndiswrapper makes baby Jesus cry”