Sinabro

novakyu@plato:~$ vrms
No non-free packages installed on plato! rms would be proud.

Sigh. Only if that were true.

Oh, it is true, as in, because my /etc/apt/sources.list only lists the main repository and not the nonfree or the contrib sections, as far as the installed .debs go, there are no non-free softwares on my system.

But, of course, I know my system better than a piece of software, and it so happens that my system has two discrete pieces of non-free software. The first is ATI’s proprietary driver for Radeon (fglrx driver, as they are called). The second is the firmware I need for my internal wireless (yeah, the same problem I had with the ipw2200).

Part of this … compromise is a result of poor research on the hardware I was buying—when I chose the miniPCI wireless card, I should’ve done better research than looking up “linux compatibility”—damn those ndiswrapper users listing a hardware as “linux compatible” because you can trick the hardware into thinking that it’s running under Windows.

But another part was … well, especially for the graphics, I simply didn’t have a choice. Supposing I had free choice of the graphics chipset separately from the CPU (an absurd assumption, but let’s suspend our sense of reality for the moment), I could choose from ATI or nVidia (Intel having been eliminated by the boycott I started recently). Here, my impression was that ATI had better record of working with free driver developers.

But of course, such discussion is academic, since, given my choice of AMD for the CPU, it would have been rather silly to get a system with nVidia graphics. AMD CPU, ATI chipset simply has to mean ATI integrated graphics.

Well, this is getting long-winded, but my only hope is this: Ralink (the chipset manufacturer for both my wireless devices) and ATI are still known to cooperate well with free software developers. For these hardwares, the developers do not need to reverse engineer existing proprietary drivers to get the specs—ATI and Ralink will release what they need. So, one day (perhaps a year from now), there will be a free implementation that provides what I need (which isn’t much—just wireless connectivity and 1280×800 resolution), and I’ll be rid myself of this shame.

But, until then, if I have to commit sin, I’ll do my own dirty work. Using non-free or contrib repositories would make me feel like I am adding to my sin of using non-free software … the sin of having others prepare those non-free software for me. Like committing murder and being an accessory to murder at the same time.