Freedom Dreams

Firstly, a couple of updates on recent posts – I gave up getting my new wifi to work upstairs, its just too frustrating. I’ve also had further problems with the fan on my downstairs computer. The new fan is larger than the previous one, and catches on the motherboard, causing the machien to overheat again. However, I think I managed to solve this problem by wedging some paper underneath the powersupply.

So, I’m on school holiday now, so I have the time to resurrect a couple of projects I started a while ago. The first is multistanza, my free version of ubuntu’s multiverse repo. Now that I run gnewsense, not having packages like vlc or mplayer in main or universe is becoming quite annoying. I rewrote a substantial part of my multistanza creation script, so that it doesn’t require root, and doesn’t accidently include the non-free povray. My rewrite should also make it easier to support multiple archectures, as I am now working out the package url and wgetting it, rather than relying on the system-specific apt-get cache. I am also using my new(ish) hosting to host a repository – multistanza.freedomdreams.co.uk – but I must be careful not to pull too much bandwidth. I wonder if the people at gnewsense would be willing to host it for me.

The other thing I’ve had another look at is my Freedometer. This is a program that will scan your system, tell you how free it is, and help you make it more free. I wrote some code for it a while ago, but never publicised it. What I’ve done recently is clean up the code a little, and build a proper website, so that I can publicise it to try to find other people to work on it with me. At the moment, its written in python and only works fully on debian based distrobutions.