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Yet Another way around Linux's Windows SecureBoot problem | 211 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
You seem confused
Authored by: stegu on Thursday, July 19 2012 @ 07:44 AM EDT
Don't confuse lock-in with limited official
support. Because it runs Ubuntu, it runs Linux.
The understandable fact that the manufacturer
doesn't officially support every other
distribution on the planet and provide images
for them does not mean that you are forced to
use Ubuntu or Android. You can roll your own,
like with any other non-restricted piece of
computer hardware that has had appropriate
drivers for Linux written for it.

The choice is still there to run something
completely different. The manufacturer does
not attempt to restrict what you can do with
your own hardware while calling it "security".

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Yet Another way around Linux's Windows SecureBoot problem
Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, July 19 2012 @ 08:50 AM EDT
> Trading one lock-in for another?

Not at all. You seem to misunderstand what a "distribution" is. To illustrate, here is the source code for the LibreOffice Office suite for Linux. LibreOffice is open source, there is only one source code available. This means that LibreOffice for Linux is essentially the same for a Linux distributions. What Linux distributions, such as Ubuntu, do is they take this source code and compile and build it with a build environment for that particular distribution. They package the resulting binary in a format suitable for use with the package manager and repositories of that distribution. They put the packages in the distribution's repositories, and make it available for users to download. These binary packages are generally not suitable for use on any other distribution.

But there is absolutely no lock-in, because the exact same source code is taken, compiled, built, packaged and distributed by other distributions as well. LibreOffice for Linux is the same application no matter the distribution. There are not different versions written for different distributions.

Now if you don't like LibreOffice, there is now an emerging alternative Office Suite targetted at the KDE4 desktop called the Calligra Suite. There is only one source code for this suite also, and any distribution can distribute it, although you would probably only find it offered by a KDE4 distribution. This alternative suite uses the same file format (OpenDocument {ODF} 1.2) and is completely interoperable with LibreOffice.

So applications are interoperable, and shared amongst distributions. Even the distributions themselves are based on one another. For example, Blue Systems, the company which now sponsors the Kubuntu distribution, also puts together the Netrunner distribution, which is based on the same code, and can use the same binary packages.

You can run LibreOffice or the Calligra suite on any of these distributions, and any of them will run on any system (including the ODROID-X) which runs Ubuntu, or Debian, or any other Linux for that matter.

So where is the lock-in?

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

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