Is freedom affordale?
Honestly i don't have skill to flash the bios with the hardware method i just had experience with software method on a Lenovo X60.
I was looking at few Libreboot laptops.Prices are insanely high.
Why a Libreboot x200 is more expensive let's say than a T420 or x220?
Can we do something to make free software/hardware more affordable?
I think we are missing the point.If freedom comes with a cost in this case economically people will never think to make a switch and we'll never convince them to make the jump.
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I don't know of any solution as of now, besides buying used X200 with Libreboot that people resell from time to time (something around 150 € usually).
Other solutions might be new SBCs with ARM processors. The RockPro64 with 4GB memory is sold for 79 USD by Pine64, it is based on RK3399 which may have performance in similar range like the Core 2 duo in the X200, and it has some feature the X200 does not have (like USB 3.0), but there is no disk and no monitor. The free PCIe x4 slot could be used for some board to add a disk faster than USB 3.0.
Perhaps that could work fully with a free bootloader and no blob at all but I am not sure. That would be nice if Trisquel had support for that.
EDIT: Since the RockPro64 boots on microSD card, flashing by software is super easy (just copy a disk image with dd from another computer).
You can't beat that:
666? I never knew Steve Jobs was being so obvious about his anti-Christ-ness.
I guess the mark of the beast is not a tattoo on the forehead, but instead it's an iPhone in the butt pocket of your bluejeans.
The trick was that people would normally expect the Devil to be in the details.
So they all looked at the small prints and missed both the price and the motto.
I didn't even notice that motto. The two Steve's were literally Satan. Weird. I always knew that stupid "command" key on the mac keyboards was evil.
> command key
That was a clear reference to the statue of the Commander in Don Juan, bringing him straight to his final destination: Hell.
Although some have speculated that Don Juan must in fact have used the wrong key in a rush to satisfy natural needs, or deliberately jumped in when he figured out that philandering must be much more fun with hellish women.
> Honestly i don't have skill to flash the bios with the hardware method
Honestly you need to learn to use an external programmer.
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> you need to learn to use an external programmer
I'd like to but doesn't that require to be able to (de)soldier tiny things in exactly the right place?
I can only see with one eye at a time (both eyes work bbut my brain can't assemble the images, it was like that as far as I can remember).
Moving some object to exactly the right place is the kind of task that I almost always fail to do. If I am not very careful, I easily pour water outside of my glass because it is not obvious for me that the pot I am holding is not really over my glass.
You are right. It's expensive. I think minifree will open it's webshop to european customer in november.
You can find lot of tutorial to install libreboot on the web if you look. Maybe find a model on ebay. But its true. It's not easy to do.
But think that once you got the laptop, you have it for a long time. Thinkpad are good and very well supported with "linux". It's worth it.
> minifree will open it's webshop to european customer in november.
"Shipping *worldwide* from the UK!"
Or are you talking about something else?
Oh I was giving a wrong answer. The website was updated
"Sales to the European Union have resumed. Minifree ships worldwide, including EU."
Minifree seems to be currently shipping worldwide, except to Northern Ireland:
"Minifree is currently unable to ship to Northern Ireland." Brexit might in fact have made a few things slightly more complicated.
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You don't have to use a librebooted laptop, if you can't afford one. Just get a laptop that has at least an integrated intel graphics card, buy a WiFi add-on (USB or otherwise) with an Atheros chip and you're good to go. Bonus points if you can find a laptop where graphics AND WiFi work out of the box.
This solution with librebooting old laptops is not a permanent fix to the problem, it's a workaround that exists in the modern broken world of proprietary software dominating the market. It's not like we as a community should try to convince everyone to switch to such a machine. That's not a sustainable way of doing things. The actual solution must be - manufacturers stop creating hardware that has malicious features. If installing libreboot is as easy as updating your UEFI or BIOS - THAT'S when we have won, THAT'S what should be the goal. Not just convincing everyone to switch to a librebooted X200 etc.
librebooted old laptops are a workaround that work right now for everyone who wishes to be as free as possible, as soon as possible, while it is still actually impossible to really be fully free.
If you can modify the machines yourself, do it. If not, pay others to do it for you. That's why librebooted laptops are rather expensive, if performance per $ is considered - you pay others to modify the hardware and make sure everything works, it's an old machine after all. And you can always get some other laptop, that just happens to have an Intel integrated graphicscard and use an Atheros-based WiFi solution.
I almost never do wifi anymore. I'm on ethernet probably over 99.8% of the time. If you wanted to do one thing to take charge of your devices, I'd say it would be stop using wifi, and get an ethernet router/firewall that is 100% under your control.
As a community, I think we spend far too much time and effort agonizing over all the non-free wifi hardware dilemmas caused by the device manufacturers, when we should be focusing on the connectivity that we can much more easily control.
Thanks, I had been busy brewing a two-page essay on nonfree wifi chipsets running with Trisquel because their nonfree firmware in stored on ROM. I can now trash it.
In all seriousness, your point might have been fully valid a decade ago, and is probably still valid for many of us, but we should also keep awareness of what is going on around us in the hardware market: I just checked again and I can confirm that the most recent piece of hardware on which I was able to run some form of partially liberated system has no wired ethernet socket. Here is what Thinkpenguin has to tell us about their USB Ethernet adapter:
"Considering how long USB gigabit adapters have been around you might have thought that we would have had such a product in our catalog for a very long time now. Well, you would unfortunately be mistaken. Until recently we had kept our eyes open and continued to test and research different chips and gigabit adapter designs- but nothing ever met even our minimum expectations and standards and so for years we have reluctantly refrained from selling any USB gigabit ethernet adapters. " Now they do, for about $70.
Just got to do it the old fashion way I guess - build your own tower computer with a NIC card or two or three jammed in there.
I have always wanted to try and enhance nadeb's contraption design: I might build a giant tinfoil hat out of various wireless NICs and antennas, and hijack the radio resources of the whole neighborhood in order to fulfill my dream of watching all Black Adder episodes at once, including the Millenium Special and the Christmas Carol Special, in 4K UHD.
Ideally, I would prefer them not to load any nonfree firmware.
Unfortunately, I could not find the Christmas Carol special.
I guess the Millenium Special "Back & Forth" will have to do for the preliminary tests: https://tube.cadence.moe/watch?v=rzHn2H2V8N4.
jxself has a really cool dual opteron rig that can take up to 128gb of memory if I recall correctly. You can still buy the boards and all the chips on the used market, like ebay, and it can be libre-booted.
You're thinking of the KGPE-D16, which I actually have several of - https://libreboot.org/docs/hardware/kgpe-d16.html
When I'm in the market to get another one I usually check eBay and AliExpress for pricing. The board can be found for about US$150. The processor pricing depends on which model of the Opteron 6200-series "Interlagos" that you want.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AMD_Opteron_microprocessors#Opteron_6200-series_%22Interlagos%22_(32_nm)
I've found good prices for the 6282 SE at $15 each but obviously shop around and see what can be found.
If you also search eBay for "kgpe-d16 libreboot" you'll see there are sellers that also sell just the chip with libreboot already installed, which removes the need to flash it yourself. The initial flash needs to be done via hardware so being able to buy a chip that's already flashed is a benefit to people that don't want to do that.
My hope is that 32 CPU cores and 256GB of RAM is enough for most uses, especially if you consider that you can buy multiples of those boards for less than the cost of just 1 of the Talos II.
>"My hope is that 32 CPU cores and 256GB of RAM is enough for most uses"
I was under-selling the amount of ram available.
256GB of RAM is 8x more than I would ever probably use even if I was disk cloning and running a vm with 8gb in it at the same time... xD
I find wifi pretty important, because I have a laptop that I have to move around.
In that case you have probably invested in a libre USB wireless adapter?
If not, that nagging question about non-free firmware saved on ROM remains, but surely you have enough knowledge to decide whether you consider it acceptable or not. Some people might care if they were made aware of the situation, and they should be made aware in a way or another.
My laptop has an ath9k chip, and so does my router. I also have an ath9k_htc USB adapter, but I don't use it currently.
EDIT: In case you're interested, my router is a Netgear WNDR3800 from eBay, supported by LibreCMC and OpenWRT. It works very well.
WNDR3800 also can easily be debricked
via this:
https://github.com/jclehner/nmrpflash
Which is my reason, I absolutely adore this router more than any other for librecmc. TPLINK? nah...
I should also add, this router can be debricked no matter how badly its bricked as far as I know.
Anytime I hard-brick it, I have been able to fix it with that so far. :)
Has happened 4 times in the past... ;)
Aka, I was reckless...