Less than a week after the release of Ubuntu 8.04 LTS "Hardy Heron", the Free Software Foundation has gone ahead and released version 2.0 (named DeltaH) of gNewSense. For those not familiar with gNewSense, this is one of the few distributions certified by the Free Software Foundation as being a truly free Linux distribution...Here are a few screenshots from this latest release.

With the recent news of beta releases from Fedora and Ubuntu, I decided to see how far the graphics support has come. So, I downloaded live ISO images of Fedora 11 Beta and Ubuntu 9.04 "Jaunty Jackalope" Beta and created bootable USB images with FUSBi.

If you would like to take it for a spin, there is a 3.6 GB installer DVD image for fresh installations and upgrades, installation-only and Live CD and Live DVD images for KDE and GNOME 3, and free and non-free Network installer images.

"Download and try gNewSense GNU/Linux, an operating system that contains nothing but free software! Even the drivers for all the devices this system supports are free software. You can test drive gNewSense before you install it and see what a completely free computer operating system can do for you. This CD is an updated version of the gNewSense GNU/Linux system I discussed before..."

"Following are the GNU/Linux distributions we know of which have a firm policy commitment to only include and only propose free software. They reject non-free applications, non-free programming platforms, non-free drivers, or non-free firmware “blobs”.

Brian Brazil and the team behind the ultra-free gNewSense GNU/Linux distribution have released a beta of the forthcoming 2.0 (or Deltah) series. gNewSense is based on Ubuntu but strips the distribution of non-free components to provide users with a truly free operating system

Knowing when a GNU/Linux distribution is free used to be simple. If all its software had licenses approved by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) or the Open Source Initiative, then a distribution was free. Otherwise, it wasn't.

"The appearance in the past year of so-called "completely libre" distributions such as gNewSense and Gobuntu, especially against the backdrop of existing distributions, like BLAG, Dyne:bolic, Ututo and others, might seem to point to an increased interest in software freedom.

Linux has, in some ways, always been a bit politicized in the sense that there are true believers among Linux users and developers that all software should be truly free. gNewSense Linux is geared toward those who want a truly free Linux distribution.