Dr. Matt Lee (mattl)

Web standards, accessibility, free/open source software, old UNIX/TV/Music and occasional wargaming

How Stallman operates his computer (2007)

  1. I use gNewSense, a GNU/Linux distro. I chose that distro because it has the policy of rejecting non-free software. There are two other installable distros that are entirely free: Ututo and BLAG. The FSF sysadmins prefer to maintain gNewSense because it is familiar to them, being similar to Debian, which is what we used to use.
  2. I occasionally use GNOME for tasks that need graphics, but mostly I use a text console.
  3. I spend most of my time editing in Emacs. I read and send mail with Emacs.
  4. I have several free web browsers on my laptop, but I generally use my own machine only to talk with a few sites operated for or by the GNU Project, FSF or me. I will fetch web pages from other sites by sending mail to a program that runs wget.
  5. The programming languages I use are Lisp and C. They are also my favorite languages. However, since around 1992 I have been very busy with free software activism, too busy to do much programming. As a result, I have not had time to learn newer languages such as Perl, Java, Python or Ruby.

This link is somewhat hidden away on his website. I hope by blogging it I can help put the rumour that Richard only uses a text console and that he doesn’t use the web at all, to rest.
Source

Published: Tue Jul 17 2007 05:06:53 GMT-0400 (Eastern Daylight Time) by