Ministry of Freedom is back. Libreboot-preinstalled laptops with FSF-endorsed Trisquel
Hi everyone!
I was previously operating as "RetroFreedom". This was an experimental rebrand, and today I switched back to the old name: Ministry of Freedom.
Trading as Ministry of Freedom, Minifree Ltd provides secure, privacy-respecting laptops that come with 100% Free Software, including drivers (e.g. wifi) and OS+applications. They have FSF-endorsed Libreboot BIOS replacement and Trisquel GNU+Linux operating system pre-installed. Profits from sales fund the Libreboot project, lead by me, Leah Rowe; I also own and operate Minifree.
I'm the lead developer and founder of the Libreboot project: https://libreboot.org
Laptops available here: https://minifree.org/
Happy hacking!
~Leah
PS:
New Libreboot release soon.
The current Libreboot 20210522 testing release (from May 2021) is more or less complete, and the most major issue (the reset bug) is now fixed in libreboot Git.
I'm polishing the current Git and aiming for a new stable release.
Minifree was trending today on hackernews
EDIT: prices changed again. Instead of providing SSDs and 8G RAM and add-ons, they are now installed by default
EDIT2: i've changed it again. RAM and SSD/HDD configurable again, but now it's 1TB SSDs instead of 480GB
16MiB chip upgrade now installed, by default
Most Libreboot laptops sold by Minifree have 8MiB or 4MiB chips, for installing Libreboot onto. However, it is possible to upgrade these chips to 16MiB capacity, by de-soldering the default chip and soldering on a 16MiB chip. Minifree now does this, by default, on all Libreboot laptops.
Having this much capacity will allow you to easily have a powerful busybox+linux system in the boot flash. In fact, a distro specifically designed for use with coreboot (Libreboot is based on coreboot) exists, which you can download and compile, and add to your ROM: https://www.linuxboot.org/
Adding Linuxboot by default is planned for future Libreboot releases. Linuxboot is a small busybox+linux system that provides a kexec-based bootloader called u-root. It has many advanced features, and it can parse grub.cfg files so it’s a drop-in replacement for GRUB. It’s very powerful and since it’s Linux based, that means it also has excellent networking features. You can do a lot with Linuxboot!