FOSSwire

Free Software Foundation chairman and all around computer freedom guru Richard Stallman has written an article for the BBC entitled 'It's not the Gates, it's the bars'.

But Gates didn't invent proprietary software, and thousands of other companies do the same thing. It's wrong, no matter who does it.

Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, and the rest, offer you software that gives them power over you. A change in executives or companies is not important. What we need to change is this system.

That's what the free software movement is all about. "Free" refers to freedom: we write and publish software that users are free to share and modify.

We do this systematically, for freedom's sake; some of us paid, many as volunteers. We already have complete free operating systems, including GNU/Linux.

If you've read up on Stallman's views on the issue of proprietary software, most of that article simply reiterates the points he makes about the perils of proprietary software and how free software is meant to put the user back in control and give them freedom.

In a sense, it's just the same old mantra being regurgitated, but using Bill Gates' recent departure from an active role at Microsoft as a reason to bring up the issue.

I did think it was interesting, though, that Stallman has got an article on the BBC News Technology website. The overwhelming majority of computer users have no idea of the concept of free software (at least in the way that RMS means it) and using a reputable and very popular news source to get his message out.

If you're new to the FOSS world and haven't read Stallman's views on this issue, it's definitely worth a read to get his and the FSF's view. I don't for a minute expect everyone to agree on everything, and it obviously doesn't necessarily reflect the viewpoints of the whole community. There's a wide spectrum of differing views on whether proprietary software is a good thing and motivations for building and using free software.

For those of us who are familiar, I thought it would be interesting to point out the use of this channel to get the message out, as it's certainly something I don't remember seeing before.

[image source] in public domain

FSF-sponsored GNU/Linux distribution gNewSense has recently been updated to version 2.0. The release announcement states:

I've just released the LiveCD for gNewSense 2.0, the first full release of DeltaH.
This is less than a week after Hardy was released.

All bugs reported since the 1.9 beta have been addressed. Thank you to everyone who reported bugs, they were useful in making this release better.

For those not already in the know, gNewSense is a distribution based upon Ubuntu. The aim of the distro is to strip Ubuntu of all non-free software components and offer a completely 'pure' free software distribution to those who wish for it. This new 2.0 release is based upon the recent Ubuntu Hardy Heron version, as the announcement states.

Other than the removal of non-free components, and lack of Ubuntu branding, there isn't an awful lot of difference between gNewSense and the distro it is derived from. Nevertheless, for people looking for a complete operating system that has no proprietary components, gNewSense offers this with the same ease of installation and use as Ubuntu.

You can download the new gNewSense release using the available torrents, or download normally using a mirror.

I recently covered how to make a mirror of a website with GNU's wget command line program and in the comments of that post there were several suggestions for more advanced options which allow you to control your downloading further.

So I've decided to follow up on that post and look at some of the more advanced options that wget offers the user.

No parent option

If you are doing a mirror, but you only want to mirror a subdirectory of the main site (for example, just /news/), you might run into a problem. Because many of the pages at /news/ link back to /, you'll inadvertently end up downloading the whole site.

The solution to this, pointed out by Todd in the comments, is to use the no parent option, -np.

In our example, we'd do:

$ wget -mk -w 20 -np http://example.com/news/

Update only changed files

Continuing in our mirroring scenario, another extremely useful option for preserving bandwidth on both sides is to update only the files that the server reports as changed.

This option is -N.

$ wget -mk -w 20 -N http://example.com/

Thanks to Paul William Tenny in the comments for that tip.

Random delay on mirror

And finally for our mirror-specific tips, you can also randomise the delay between downloads. There are several reasons you might want to do this, including sites that don't take kindly to being mirrored, even considerately, and block clients that they suspect of doing it (some bots can be pretty nasty, and you might be categorised as one of 'them').

Randomising the wait time - and combining with the user agent option below - can be steps to circumvent this automatic protection.

If you do find yourself using this feature for that reason, please continue to be considerate and follow any rules regarding the content you've been given. Mirror responsibly.

$ wget -w 20 --random-wait -mk http://example.com/

The wait value - 20 in this case - is used as a base value to calculate what the random wait times will be. They will alternate between 0 and 2 times that value (in this case, 0-40 seconds).

Custom user agent

Some sites might have some strange restrictions on what browsers can access it, or perhaps have different versions of a site depending on the browser used. I can't say I agree with sites that do this, unless there's a really good reason, but it shouldn't stop you from using wget for access.

Using wget, you can set a fake user agent string so that the program reports itself as a different browser.

$ wget -U "user agent" http://example.com/

Combine the -U option with any others you want, obviously. Here are a few user agents you can use to get you started:


IE6 on Windows XP: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Microsoft Windows NT 5.1)
Firefox on Windows XP: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.14) Gecko/20080404 Firefox/2.0.0.14
Firefox on Ubuntu Gutsy: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.1.14) Gecko/20080418 Ubuntu/7.10 (gutsy) Firefox/2.0.0.14
Safari on Mac OS X Leopard: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/523.12.2 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0.4 Safari/523.12.2

That's it for now, if you have any more useful wget tips and tricks, share them in the comments!