I gave gNewSense a spin this weekend. It's mostly a good experience, but I am sticking with Debian for now. Here's why.

I have thoroughly enjoyed Debian Etch since I installed it back in February, but I just had a hankering to try out the FSF-sanctioned gNewSense, specifically the KDE install. In case you live under a rock, it's an Ubuntu fork. That means any newcomer, non-techie could essentially install it. And, despite my qualms about the name and the bright green color scheme for the KDE variety, gNewSense-KDE provides a nice experience overall.

The installation was simple enough. You run through the 6-step installation routine by simply entering your personal information, location information and tell the installer where on the hard drive you want gNewSense to reside. That's half the number of steps for those out there who have been through a 12-step program. Then just sit back and enjoy the ride while the installer does all the hard work.

The system boots in 1 minute, 40 seconds on my 1.2GHz Dell Latitude C610. That's not half bad, really. O.k., truthfully, I like the gNewSense artwork a little better than the dark brown theme the default Ubuntu systems come with. It's kind of reminiscent of SUSE. And I realize the development team is fairly small, so it's hard to be too critical of their taste. Still, it's nice to know we can change that easily. Now that we've booted and gotten a feel for the theme, what's up with the functionality?

The odd thing was that gNewSense auto-detected and configured my wireless LAN card at work, where they have an open access wi-fi network, but couldn't seem to do it at home, where I have WEP encryption. Weird. Debian Etch handled it well enough, even though I had to manually install the driver. And my wifi card is an EW-7608Pg, that is supposed to "just work" "out of the box" with Debian Etch. Oh well. So wi-fi still has a ways to go yet with GNU/Linux systems.

All the usual office productivity apps and so forth were fine. No problems there. However, I had signed up for a few website that use Flash. I need a Flash player. I fired up Adept to search the gNewSense repository, only to discover that Gnash isn't in there. Again, I realize the dev team is small, but this is a months-old issue with gNewSense. It strikes me as odd that the dev team would consider this a low priority, given that so many people give such high priority to a mulitmedia-enabled Internet experience.

I did attempt to follow a tutorial about installing Gnash on gNewSense-KDE, but that went very badly. Not only did the ./configure fail, due to missing dependencies in the repository, it seems to have created some sort of interference with my wi-fi card. Attempting to install Gnash is the only thing I can point to, as the card worked well enough (minus the WEP encryption issue) before that.

The other issues I have are more likely a matter of taste. I like the idea of managing my system as root. I like being able to install more than one GUI environment if I want, but the *Ubuntus are designed to let you run only one at a time. Ultimately, minus Gnash and an obvious way to setup one of those fancy-shmancy 3D desktop environments, gNewSense is as useful as any other GNU/Linux distribution. But I can easily get Gnash for Debian. And yes, I really do need it.

I really wish the gNewSense team would build directly from Debian, but using the Ubuntu installer. Use their own repositories as the default, but keep everything mapped to Debian. This will mean they have less work to do in terms of maintaining a repository, while still allowing people to access a wider selection of software. Then, when users like me need to, we can access more Free Software than they can maintain by themselves.

I could simply un-install all the Gnash dependencies, and hopefully remove whatever caused the wi-fi issue. But who has time for that? This article is late to press; it shoud have been published hours ago. I can ill-afford to be late in the news publishing industry. So, while I am definitely keeping an eye on gNewSense, I'm just not ready for it yet. Don't let me deter you; you may very well be ready. As for me, I'll go back to Debian. In fact, I may just give Lenny a spin.