Between Fedora 12 and 13 [LWN.net]

Between Fedora 12 and 13

Posted Dec 13, 2009 9:37 UTC (Sun) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946)
In reply to: Between Fedora 12 and 13 by Xnux
Parent article: Between Fedora 12 and 13

Fedora's licensing policies are far more strict than other mainstream distributions and firmware policy is called a "Exception" for good reasons. Fedora Project will continue to replace firmware with more free equivalents whenever possible. We were afaik, the first distribution to include the free and open source reverse engineered Broadcom firmware by default.

I am not sure what you want to do with alternative kernels but building such a image is fairly easy.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/How_to_create_and_use_a_Liv...

If you need further help, you are free to post to the Fedora list or even contact me directly.

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Between Fedora 12 and 13

Posted Dec 13, 2009 19:59 UTC (Sun) by Xnux (guest, #62436) [Link]

I suppose what I am interested in doing is creating a version of Fedora that replaces the default Linux kernel with the Freed-ora version of the Linux-libre kernel (which can be found at http://www.fsfla.org/download/linux-libre/freed-ora/F-12/) and removes any software specifically affected by patents (e.g., Mono and its dependencies, MP3 playback, DVD CSS, etc.). That way, when I actually burn this custom distro to a Live CD, it does not contain any non-free or patent-encumbered software.

How easy would it be for an intermediate Linux user like myself to do this?
When a new version of Linux-libre comes out (there is a new version for each Fedora release), would I have to manually update the kernel each time, or can I configure Software Update to do this?
Is there any way I can convince the Fedora team to maintain a 100% free Fedora version à la Gobuntu? I know that is a lot to ask, but it seems like that would be a lot easier than hacking Fedora myself, plus it would make a lot of disgruntles gNewSense/Trisquel/BLAG users happy.

Thank you for your help.

Between Fedora 12 and 13

Posted Dec 14, 2009 0:53 UTC (Mon) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458) [Link]

Since there are probably (idiotic) software patents covering everything from linked lists to writing "Hello, world!", there just isn't a viable Linux distribution (or any other operating system, for that matter) that isn't patent encumbered.

Between Fedora 12 and 13

Posted Dec 14, 2009 5:26 UTC (Mon) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

It is fairly easy. As an example of custom Fedora Remix, feel free to take a look at

http://omega.dgplug.org/11/Live/i686/Omega-11-i686-Live.ks

Since the alternative kernels you are talking about is part of a repository, you can simply point to it within a kickstart file. Third party repositories usually have the repository files as part of foo-release that needs to be added to the kickstart file and software updater will be able to pick up updates easily. Gobuntu doesn't actually exist anymore btw and Fedora Project is unlikely to be interested in maintaining any kernel variants.