Acer Aspire One: GPL situation?

[Peter Robinson]

If you go to ftp://ftp.linpus.com/dists/ there's all the src rpms
there which have the source code. From memory of an interview with one
of the Acer people its a distro derived from Fedora. I think you can
use a tool like rpm2cpio to extract the src rpm on a debian based
distro. It looks like the versions of the distro should be
downloadable from links like
http://www.linpus.com/xampp/modules/mydownloads/viewcat.php?cid=16 but
the actual link to the download is broken.

Peter

On Mon, Aug 4, 2008 at 11:16 AM, William Gallafent <william at gallaf.net> wrote:
> I recently purchased one of these machines (manufactured by Acer,
> http://www.acer.co.uk/ ) which runs Linpus Linux Lite (
> http://www.linpus.com/ ). It is a very nice piece of hardware, the price is
> right (£220), and it runs Linux. What's not to like?
>
> I now wish to see the source code for the GPL software which ships on it.
>
> There is a piece of paper in the box which says "The Linpux Linux GPL source
> can be downloaded from the website www.linpus.com."
>
> I have searched that web site, and cannot find a download location for the
> source code. So far, fairly unsatisfactory, since I would expect it to be a
> lot easier to locate the source code given the "written offer" quoted above.
> I have emailed Linpus and Acer, and await a response from either of them. I
> will update the list if I receive a response.
>
> As a footnote, the reason I want to look at the source code is to determine
> the configuration of the sound hardware, which is not working perfectly for
> me using ALSA of Xubuntu 8.04.1, nor ALSA 1.0.17. Additionally, with the
> shipped version of Linpus Linux the machine locks hard if the wifi is
> switched to adhoc mode, although it works with managed mode. With the latest
> MadWifi HAL and Xubuntu 8.04.1's stock kernel, it no longer locks hard,
> although I haven't actually got it to work yet.
>
> I just don't understand why, when the system ships with a recovery DVD
> (which has plenty of spare capacity), the source code for the whole shipping
> distribution isn't included in a subdirectory of the DVD - that would surely
> be the most straightforward way to provide it to end-users!
>
> As a second footnote, the piece of paper says "Copyright (C) 1997-2010
> Linpus Technologies, Inc." - one can surely not claim copyright protection
> for a future date, since the copyright is intrinsically linked to the
> written text, which must by definition already have been written in 2008 …?
>
> As a third, according to that document apparently "Linux" is a registered
> trademark of Linus Trovalds. Who he? ;)
>