Yogesh Ashok Powar

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    • Free Software - It respects your freedom

    Free OS for school computers

    Tags: FSF FreeSoftware

    Free Software - It respects your freedom

    Can GNU/Linux be really run on school computers?

    This was the question once asked by one of the school teachers to whom I was giving a small talk about GNU/Linux and its power. They were OK with the theory of four freedoms and their relation with GNU/Linux, but they were not convince since they have never seen such system before. I promised them to present then one of the GNU/Linux operating system in our next meeting.

    I am a great fan of Archlinux because of its KISS concept and thus I opted for Parabola GNU/Linux.

    I went to main site of https://parabolagnulinux.org and downloaded graphical live ISO image from one of the near by mirror. Burned that ISO on USB stick and boot my laptop with it to find if operating system can detect laptops hardware. I could see nice LXDE login prompt with ‘parabola’ as the user. Default passowrd is also ‘parabola’. Once logged in, I could perform basic sanity mainly browsing Internet and playing songs.

    I then followed the steps mention at https://wiki.parabolagnulinux.org/Installation_Guide and got my freedom on the laptop. Following are some screenshots for different programs that can be configured on such system.

    Gnome

    Gnome-classic

    Xface

    libre-office

    Even with all this, we are still scratching the surface. There is no limit with what GNU/Linux can do. There are thousands of such GNU packages. One can get the feel visiting http://directory.fsf.org/wiki/GNU. Future is full of freedoms and breaking of prisms or http://prism-break.org/.

    Tags: FSF FreeSoftware
    Updated on: 2013-09-06