FSF Membership Card

May 27, 2010 at 12:12am Tagged: , and , with 0 Comments

Well, my FSF membership card arrived today. It's pretty incredible really — fits in a wallet, and yet has 2GB of storage. It's, obviously, thicker than the average card, but it's not fat. If there is one thing flash memory is good for, it's things like this.

FSF Membership Card (Small)

Naturally, I immediately wanted to try the copy of Trisquel Live, a completely FOSS GNU/Linux distribution ASAP but, much to my chagrin, it didn't actually work on my computer, though it did in qemu. Rather than think "Great, it doesn't work", I instead thought "Great, an opportunity to learn how to use syslinux" :)

So I made three partitions, a 600MB fat32 partition for sharing files, a 1GB ext2 partiton for syslinux to live on, and a 250MB partition for a writable home folder to live on. Setting things up with unetbootin was incredibly easy, I just downloaded the latest Trisquel ISO, mounted my ext2 partition, and ran unetbootin. Unfortunately, though, unetbootin tried to use syslinux which only works on vfat partitions, so I had to manually install extlinux (with the command extlinux -i), and it booted!

Once I knew it worked, I decompressed the squashfs image and made a few changes — mounting the ext4 and fat32 partitions — remade the image, and rebooted to check it still worked. Well, it's now working wonderfully, and I've put some GNU stuff on the fat32 partition if ever I'm in need at a Windows machine, currently I've added

  • The Freedom Fry video
  • Free Software, Free Society: Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman PDF
  • The latest edition of the FSF Bulletin (I plan to add new bulletins as and when they come out)

Can't think of anything else, but that should be enough for now. Oh, and my geek points have shot through the roof now that I have this thing in my wallet :P

GNU Volunteer Webmaster

May 5, 2010 at 7:45pm Tagged: , with 0 Comments

After applying in January, getting accepted last month, and becoming a full webmaster this month, I am now a GNU volunteer webmaster! I join a crack team of other volunteers, some of whom have been GNU webmasters for years, fixing and improving www.gnu.org when things need doing.

In fact, I've already made my first contribution. See the Free Software Users' Group - Idukki link on the fs-user-groups page? I did that :)

The GNU website uses CVS (Concurrent Versions System, for the uninformed), an early version control system. Any changes committed to the repository become instantly visible on gnu.org, so care is essential. Until recently I didn't know any CVS at all, but I found a guide for beginners through google and can now use it for basic things, which is all I need, really. Knowing how to use Git beforehand definitely helped me pick up what the commands do though, one thing I have noticed, compared to Git, CVS is slow.

Oh, and I have a new email address. Nothing says "Free Software Geek" like @gnu.org email.

Warm fuzzy feeling

January 13, 2010 at 8:54pm Tagged: and , with 0 Comments

Noticed the little array of buttons on the right there? They're the cause of the warm fuzzy feeling I'm currently experiencing. Of course, there's the normal warm fuzzy feeling that every webmaster feels when their site validates in both the (X)HTML and CSS versions of their choice, but there's another button there, cause of another warm fuzzy feeling.

I've just become a student member of the Free Software Foundation and, with it comes several things:

  • Warm fuzzy feeling for supporting Free Software
  • My very own @members.fsf.org email address (contact page will be updated imminently)
  • USB membership card containing Trisquel Live, a completely free GNU/Linux distribution
  • Free entry to the LibrePlanet conference—just in case I ever decide to go
  • Discount from their shop (though I haven't really seen anything I like/want…)
  • And… a biannual postal bulletin, sent to me by genuine FSF postal monkeys.

Now, if only the GNU chief webmaster would get back to me about that volunteer webmaster position…

Arch Hurd

January 13, 2010 at 8:29am Tagged: , , and , with 0 Comments

This has already been covered by other bloggers but, as I did found the project (albeit accidentally), I think I'm justified in writing a post about it :)

The Arch Hurd Project is a crazy-sounding project of porting Archlinux to the GNU/Hurd platform so we can all, as Allan McRae put it, bask in microkernally goodness. We're currently working on building a good cross-compiler and cross-compiled system (most of the pieces are in place, it seems), after which we'll cross-compile pacman, autoconf/automake, make, et cetera until we can start packaging things up. The first release is likely to be a QEMU image.

So, what exactly makes an OS Arch-like? As Arch is what you make it, that's a rather difficult question to answer, I did, however, narrow it down to a few things which I think are truly important for any Arch system:

  • Use of the pacman package manager.
  • Some form of ABS tree.
  • System-wide config file like /etc/rc.conf.
  • i686 optimisation.

Currently the i686 optimisation is proving to be a pain: we're not sure if it's something we've done, or something else. Yet. Pacman will, obviously, have to wait until we can actually boot it first, the ABS tree is begun (as well as repositories), and I don't think anybody has even thought about an /etc/rc.conf file yet—though it shouldn't be too difficult to alter the Hurd initscripts to pluck data from a config file.

Other sites/blog posts you might find interesting:

Arch Hurd
The official Arch Hurd website
Parabola GNU/Linux
A project to provide an entirely free Archlinux
Arch Hurd?
Allan's post about Arch Hurd
A … “Hurd” work to do
Flamelab's post about Arch Hurd