Review: Parabola GNU/Linux-libre Parabola GNU/Linux-libre is one of a few Linux distributions that meet the Free Software Foundation's (FSF) guidelines for free operating systems. The distribution is based on Arch Linux and ships with the Linux-libre kernel, which doesn't include software for which no source code is available (or which is otherwise proprietary). On top of that Parabola removes any non-free packages from the system.



The distribution is available for the armv7, i686 and x86_64 architectures. The main ISO boots to a command line, where we can manually install the operating system, while a live ISO gives us the MATE desktop and access to a basic graphical installer. Interestingly, it is also possible to migrate from Arch Linux to Parabola.



Installation



My main concern before I started my trial was hardware support and I therefore first tried the live ISO for version 2017.05.28 . The 64-bit image is 2.2GB in size and boots to a rather pink-looking MATE desktop (the wallpaper and use of purple for elements like scroll bars reminded me of Pony OS). I was pleased to find that I could connect to wireless networks and that graphics and sound worked as expected.



While exploring the live environment I did note several bugs in applications. The most annoying issue was that menus often looked completely squashed. I have seen that issue before in MATE 1.16 (which is the MATE version the live ISO uses) and think it is related to applications missing GTK+ version 3 support. I also found that the Abiword word processor was completely unusable; it somehow had a black background and trying to type or click anything would make the window flicker for several seconds.





Parabola GNU/Linux-libre 2017.05.28 -- Running the live MATE desktop with Abiword

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The live CD's graphical installer didn't work for me either. It seems the installer is an experimental feature - there is hardly any documentation about it and while going through the installation steps I got error after error. The installation did finish but after rebooting my laptop I was presented with a completely black screen.





Parabola GNU/Linux-libre 2017.05.28 -- The command line installer

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The recommended way to install Parabola is by using the command line. This can be done via the MATE ISO (simply open a terminal window) but I decided to try the main ISO instead. Unfortunately, I found Parabola's installation guide rather unhelpful. The guide provides a very rough outline of what needs to be done and refers to the Arch Linux wiki for more information at every stage. I quickly found that, in effect, I needed to follow the Arch Linux install guide but keep an eye out for any Parabola-specific steps. The first such step was the verification of package signatures and at this point I ran into trouble: the output showed various error 404s and the command failed. I noted similar errors while installing the base system later on and I therefore decided to take the alternative route by first installing Arch with the MATE desktop and then migrating to Parabola.



Parabola's guide starts with a note about regenerating the Pacman keyring (Pacman is Arch's package manager). I wasn't sure whether or not the note was relevant as it referred to a news article from 2014. I decided to run the recommended commands, which was the wrong option - the output showed that the keyring I tried to install didn't exist. As I was unsure how to proceed I asked Parabola's IRC channel for help, and I was quickly told that it was obvious that the note in the guide was no longer relevant.





Parabola GNU/Linux-libre 2017.05.28 -- Migrating from Arch to Parabola

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Interestingly, while I was in the IRC channel another user discovered that the Parabola website and repositories were down. This may well explain the errors I had encountered. In any case, after those issues were resolved the migration from Arch to Parabola went smoothly.



Your freedom



As mentioned, Parabola ships with the Linux-libre kernel and removes any non-free packages. The latter is achieved via the your-freedom package. The only job of this package is to conflict with all known non-free packages. When I migrated from Arch to Parabola and installed your-freedom it removed three such packages: intel-ucode (something to with Intel CPUs), libxnvctrl (something to do with NVIDIA) and ttf-ubuntu-font-family (a font I had installed in Arch).





Parabola GNU/Linux-libre 2017.05.28 -- Installing the your-freedom package

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The blacklisted packages can be viewed either via the very useful packages section on the Parabola website or by running "pacman -Qi your-freedom" in a terminal. The list includes everything from web browsers (Firefox, Chromium, Opera, Vivaldi and QupZilla are all out) to VirtualBox, codecs (faac), firmware drivers (b43-firmware, broadcom-wl) and fonts, icon themes and wallpapers.



Another notable blacklisted package is yaourt, which is used to install packages from the Arch User Repository (AUR). yaourt is banned because it enables users to install non-free packages (or packages with proprietary dependencies). When I tried installing yaourt the package manager pointed out that it conflicts with your-freedom and asked if it was okay to remove the latter package. This made me realize that Parabola's approach to keeping the system libre isn't that different from, for instance, Debian's approach. In Debian, we can get access to forbidden fruits by appending "contrib non-free" to the repositories listed in the /etc/apt/sources.list file, while in Parabola you only need to remove the your-freedom package. Parabola obviously doesn't advertise this option and removing the your-freedom package would defeat the purpose of running the distro but it is worth noting that installing non-free software in Parabola is as easy as it gets.



Software and package management



The absence of access to the AUR somewhat limits the amount of software available but almost all the software I normally use was in the standard repositories. The only thing I couldn't install was tkPacman, a graphical front-end for the Pacman package manager. That meant I had to learn various Pacman commands for managing software. Pacman's syntax is rather terse but after a week or so I found I no longer needed a Pacman cheat-sheet. During my trial I installed about two dozen applications, including Claws Mail, LibreOffice, GIMP, Scribus, Inkscape and Gvim. Arch is a rolling-release distro that aims to provide the latest and greatest software and most of the packages I installed were at the newest version. I encountered no issues while installing packages and updating the system.



Wi-fi again worked out of the box (using the r8169 driver) and I was able to play and edit media files, including MP3s. Playing DRM-protected DVDs obviously didn't work, and I also wasn't able to use my printer. For me this isn't much of an issue - I very rarely watch DVDs and I haven't used my printer for years - but for others this may be problematic.





Parabola GNU/Linux-libre 2017.05.28 -- Trouble with printing pictures

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As with the live CD, I did encounter issues with various applications. The first browser I installed was Iceweasel (version 54) which is a fork of Firefox created by Debian. The browser clearly has been heavily customized by the Parabola team. The default start page features advertisements for GNU and the GNU project's DRM-free campaign and the default search engine is searx, which aggregates search results from search engines like Google without tracking users. The about:addons page has been replaced with a web page that talks about a different browser, IceCat, and provides links to a small selection of GNU-approved add-ons. I'm not sure what other customizations have been made but Iceweasel was very buggy. Among others, entering a URL and hitting the Return key would often do nothing - instead, I had to click on the Go icon in the address bar to open a URL.



IceCat, a Firefox clone maintained the GNU project, worked slightly better. The browser is based on the extended support release of Firefox (version 52.1) and comes with four pre-installed add-ons: HTTPS Everywhere, HTML5 Video Everywhere, SpyBlock (based on Adblock Plus) and LibreJS. The latter extension alerts users if a web page uses non-free JavaScript and encourages people to complain to the website about this. Pretty much all websites I visited featured the ‘Complain' tab, including IceCat's add-on page and the searx page. Personally, I don't feel passionate enough about non-free JavaScript to lodge complaints to websites and I removed the add-on. I also had to remove the HTML5 Video Everywhere extension as it caused the audio of video files embedded on web pages to start playing automatically as soon as a page was loaded.





Parabola GNU/Linux-libre 2017.05.28 -- Finding non-free JavaScript

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I had various annoying issues with other applications. After I had migrated from Arch, GTK+ version 2 applications such as Claws Mail, GIMP and HexChat didn't use the (default) MATE theme's window decorations and therefore featured the ugly, square scroll bars and buttons you might remember from Windows 95. Parabola's IRC channel was unable to help with that issue but I eventually managed to solve it by installing the gtk2+extra package. There were various other minor annoyances. To give just a few examples: in single window mode GIMP couldn't be maximized to full screen; zooming in or out in the Caja file manager didn't increase or decrease the size of files and folders without refreshing the page, and after installing Inkscape I found it had become the default document viewer.



Conclusions



Fully free distributions have been on my radar for many years. The reason I had never tried any of them is because I assumed many things wouldn't work. When I first started using Linux I often had to deal with wi-fi and sound troubles. I've never enjoyed dealing with such issues - copying commands that I don't quite understand from a guide which I hope is trustworthy just isn't for me. I anticipated I would need to, at the very least, invest in a wireless dongle but I was wrong; everything worked out of the box on my hardware.



What I hadn't expected is that I would encounter dozens of small bugs in applications that very rarely cause me issues in other Linux distros. I was able to resolve most of these issues and I realize that some of the "bugs" could be the result of my unfamiliarity with Arch (although, in my defense, the MATE desktop on the live ISO was buggy as well).



Another thing to mention is that the amount of software available is limited. For me this wasn't much of an issue, with one exception: the absence of the Chromium browser. I need to use the Google Authenticator extension for my work but, unfortunately, Chromium was removed from the repository in March this year due to "outstanding privacy and freedom violations". I understand the concerns about the browser - according to the Parabola mailing list the browser was blacklisted on the recommendation of Richard Stallman (founder of the GNU project and Free Software Foundation) because of "hundreds of lines of minified JavaScript, non-free plugins, DRM, hard-coded connections to google.com and privacy leaks". However, the removal of Chromium does present me with a stark and somewhat surreal choice: either I quit my job or, in the words of Dr Stallman, I lose my freedom. I am pragmatic enough to choose the latter option. Personally, I rather use a distro that gives me the option to use a minimal amount of non-free software.



That said, I would recommend Parabola to people who feel very strongly about free software. Parabola stands on a solid foundation, provides cutting edge software and almost all of Arch's outstanding documentation applies to Parabola. The installation and migration guides can be improved, some bugs need to be ironed out and a proper installer would be welcome but that shouldn't stop freedom-lovers from giving Parabola a try. * * * * * Hardware used for this review



My physical test equipment for this review was a Lenovo Z570 laptop with the following specifications: Processor: Intel Core i3-2350M, 2.3GHz

Memory: 4GB of RAM

Wireless network adaptor: Qualcomm Atheros AR9285

Wired network adaptor: Realtek RTL8101/2/6E 05) * * * * * Visitor supplied rating



Parabola GNU/Linux-libre has a visitor supplied average rating of: 7.7/10 from 15 review(s).

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