This is not a review of gNewSense

The thing to do is download an ISO of gNewSense, burn a disc and start shoving it into optical drives and see what happens.

The thing about gNewSense (and OpenBSD while we're at it) is that if there's no free, open-source driver for your various bits of hardware, you either have to install that code yourself, or use different hardware. And if you're going to install any kind of blobbishness, why not just go straight to the well and use Ubuntu, Debian or (insert your favorite distro/project here)?

Once I had a burned gNewSensse Deltah 2.1 disc in hand, I immediately went to a free Dell GX520 Optiplex (Pentium 4 at 3 GHz, 512 MB RAM) and booted into gNewSense.

Booting of this Ubuntu-derived distro went fine. Screen resolution was perfect (my video hardware is onboard Intel, and that's generally open) and sound worked perfectly (ditto for Intel on the sound chip).

For some reason I had a European keyboard mapping and couldn't use the | key to help grep my way through the dmesg. That could be dealt with.

But when I went to configure my Ethernet interface, nothing was there.

So I quit out of gNewSense and booted into a Ubuntu 8.04 live CD, which does support this NIC, and I grepped for eth0, which led to the following output:

ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ dmesg | grep eth0
[ 38.869559] eth0: Tigon3 [partno(BCM5751PKFBG) rev 4001 PHY(5750)] (PCI Express) 10/100/1000Base-T Ethernet 00:14:22:2c:79:79
[ 38.869571] eth0: RXcsums[1] LinkChgREG[0] MIirq[0] ASF[0] WireSpeed[1] TSOcap[1]
[ 38.869576] eth0: dma_rwctrl[76180000] dma_mask[64-bit]
[ 163.557171] tg3: eth0: Link is up at 100 Mbps, full duplex.
[ 163.557176] tg3: eth0: Flow control is on for TX and on for RX.
[ 184.399583] eth0: no IPv6 routers present

I set up the interface as usual and got networking (through which I'm writing this blog post). I guess whatever a Tigon3 [partno(BCM5751PKFBG) rev 4001 PHY(5750)] happens to be, it either doesn't have an open-source driver, or it doesn't have it in the gNewSense kernel.

A little Googling reveals that the Tigon3 is a Broadcom interface. The Linux drivers for this bit of hardware are cataloged in the Linux Kernel Driver Database.

The source for the driver itself is available on the Web.

The file begins with the following lines:

tg3.c: Broadcom Tigon3 ethernet driver.
3 *
4 * Copyright (C) 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004 David S. Miller (davem@redhat.com)
5 * Copyright (C) 2001, 2002, 2003 Jeff Garzik (jgarzik@pobox.com)
6 * Copyright (C) 2004 Sun Microsystems Inc.
7 * Copyright (C) 2005-2007 Broadcom Corporation.
8 *
9 * Firmware is:
10 * Derived from proprietary unpublished source code,
11 * Copyright (C) 2000-2003 Broadcom Corporation.
12 *
13 * Permission is hereby granted for the distribution of this firmware
14 * data in hexadecimal or equivalent format, provided this copyright
15 * notice is accompanying it.
16 */

I'm no expert when it comes to licensing, and I don't remember hearing about praise being heaped on Broadcom for ... anything. So I'll leave it to the licensing and free-software experts to determine whether or not there's a legal issue that keeps this sourced Broadcom driver from being included in the gNewSense kernel.

I could probably hack my way through compiling and installing the driver myself, but if I'm going to do that, I might as well just let Ubuntu or Debian do it for me. If my quest for freedom in all ways continued, I could find a NIC that had properly licensed drivers and use that instead, but on this Dell box at this time, gNewSense is not something I could use.

Meanwhile, I'll try gNewSense on some of the other hardware I have in my stable.

Update:

• The FSF indeed doesn't like the tg3 driver or Broadcom.

• I think my Toshiba laptop uses a Realtek NIC, which the FSF (and by extension gNewSense) likes, but the balky DVD/CD drive in this old laptop wouldn't boot the CD. This problem happens with MOST CDs I've burned. They work on other PCs but not this one. Even the OpenBSD install CD wouldn't work, and I eventually installed it with a boot floppy. (FYI ... CDs that will boot on this old Toshiba include the excellent Parted Magic, and Debian's Etch and a Half; I really wanted to run OpenBSD, so I opted to create and use a boot floppy to install over the network.)

• In the LXer thread, some suggested using a gNewSense kernel to "free up" an existing Debian installation. While this seems above my level of expertise, I think I can handle it. Problem is that when Debian patches the kernel, I'd have to keep going to gNewSense and grabbing theirs.