vrms
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| vrms | |
|---|---|
| Design by | Bdale Garbee Bill Geddes |
| Developed by | Bdale Garbee Stephen Moraco Rogério Brito |
| Written in | Perl |
| OS | Linux |
| License | GNU General Public License |
vrms (Virtual Richard M. Stallman) is a program that analyzes the set of currently-installed packages on a Debian-based system, and reports all of the packages from the non-free tree which are currently installed. Software gets placed in the non-free tree when it is agreed not to be too problematic for Debian to distribute but does not meet the Debian Free Software Guidelines and therefore cannot be included in their official distribution. For each program from 'non-free' installed, vrms displays an explanation of why it is non-free, if one is available.
This explanation is usually from a list included in the vrms package itself, but other packages can provide additional lists of explanations, too.
[edit] History
Vrms was written by Bdale Garbee and Bill Geddes for the Debian GNU/Linux system, in response to an open discussion with Richard Stallman about the issues surrounding the availability/desirability of the ’non-free’ package tree in Debian.
[edit] Example
Output of vrms in a system with Sun Java, unrar and VMware Player installed:
Non-free packages installed on localhost
sun-java5-bin Sun Java(TM) Runtime Environment (JRE) 5.0
sun-java5-demo Sun Java(TM) Development Kit (JDK) 5.0 demos and examp
sun-java5-jdk Sun Java(TM) Development Kit (JDK) 5.0
sun-java5-jre Sun Java(TM) Runtime Environment (JRE) 5.0
unrar Unarchiver for .rar files (non-free version)
Reason: Modifications problematic
vmware-player Free virtual machine player from VMware
vmware-player-kernel-modu vmware-player modules for Linux (kernel 2.6.17)
7 non-free packages, 0.6% of 1218 installed packages.
