What computer did you save from proprietary software today?
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I installed Replicant 6.0 on a US$30 Galaxy Tab 2 7" this week and it works pretty well. I'm still fussing with getting RepWiFi to work with a Think Penguin USB WiFi adapter. I plan to use the tablet as a DRM-free ereader.
In a rare moment of motivation (I'm retired), I rummaged through a box of old electronics waiting for the local recycling drive and found my spouse's ca. 2010 MacBook Pro (A1278). It's now running Trisquel 9.0 quite nicely with minimal effort. Everything but the WiFi works (not sure about the camera, which is taped over and I don't care about). Network speed is slow with the WiFi adapter, but it's usable for my needs. It flies on ethernet. I'm not sure if there's a libreboot option for this machine, but at least it's been freed from the malware that is MacOS.
So...
What computer did you save from proprietary software today (or recently)?
> ca. 2010 MacBook Pro
I'm curious: did you not need to tweak the sound output somehow? I remember having had a choice between plugging in a jack adapter and playing with the software control of the soundcard pins, on a similar machine. All this in order to escape the SomeFruit output/input jack "standard" and get back to the standard jack standard. My friend wanted to use that as a jukebox mainly, so "no sound, sorry" was not an option.
My friend is well known to be a tad stingy, so I eventually had to play with the soundcard pins. IIRC, the input (mic) and main output pins have to be inverted. The adaptor must be about $2 to $5, plus shipment, not for stingy people obviously.
When my aunt died last summer I found her old Windows Vista mini-tower and tried out a couple of 32 bit systems including Trisquel. I used it to make my 32bit free-software respin of antiX 19. I need to pull it back out soon and do something new with it. Maybe I'll do a minimalist respin of Trisquel with just a barebones window manager.
The best you could do to liberate that 2010 macbook pro? Coreboot and intel me disabled, theoretically, might be possible and if so, you could use ath9k as new wifi card most likely... dunno if it has been tested yet.
If this is true, you could use a distro supported by it without any backdoors. two problems though, EC Firmware and I don't know if anyone has done the above to a macbook pro with coreboot + me cleaner.
Important EDIT:
I looked on coreboot's website, it doesn't look like they support any apple devices... so yeah... I would advise anyone thinking of trying this, to be at least 95% sure its possible to do so and 100% sure it can be rolled back before even trying the coreboot + intel me disabled parts, let alone changing the wifi card...
;)
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>> ca. 2010 MacBook Pro and sound output
Works out-of-the-box without tweaks:
Internal sound card:
Plays streaming audio/video, computer sounds and standard audio CD via Rhythmbox through built-in speakers and headphone jack.
USB-connected external DAC (old Mobile Fidelity V-DAC):
As above. Sounds great.
DVD via VLC:
Plays a region 1 (North American) DVD as well as a region 2 DVD that would not play on a North American DVD player (but also did play when the computer was a 'Mac').
I haven't yet tried to rip a CD. Stay tuned re: jukebox suitability.
Overall, I'm very pleased and will be using this free (also feels like free as in free beer since it was destined for the recycling heap) laptop regularly. My only minor gripes are that the keyboard backlight (which I dislike) switches on at startup and intermittently while running on battery and the 'delete' key doesn't work when I want to delete emails in IceDove. Works fine otherwise. Weird.
>>libreboot
I find some references to older MacBooks, but not this one. It was still a worthwhile project.
Thanks.
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For only a short time of my computer life I have been a windows user. When I was 18, I bought in bulk an old fm radio card for my pc. When I got home later that day I found that there wasn't a driver for the windows I was using. I found on the internet someone who had made a driver for something i have never heard about. It was gnu/linux. From that time I was using red hat linux and then fedora for well over a decade.
Then my job gave me an Iphone and an Ipad. Soon I bought an apple laptop, an apple tv, apple access point and many more.... Somehow, another decade passed!
It has been over a year since my partner and I made the decision to replace all apple devices. Our motivation was Snowden's book and the need to be unplugged from all this devices. We wanted to keep our kids away from phones and tablets, and to do this we knew that we must be the first to give the example. Apple is also a really bad company*.
he most valuable asset of our generation is free time and as a parent and as a worker it is very limited. But everything can happen if you are committed!
So we replaced everything as follows:
-> My Mac Mini with a librebooted x200 connected to an external monitor,
-> My wife's macbook air with a librebooted x200
-> Apple tv with a corebooted x230 (unfortunately i cannot get sound to pass to my tv with hdmi using an x200)
(All the above are running trisquel of course.)
-> Airport express with a router with librecnc
-> Iphones with replicant n7100
-> Ipads with nothing, we now read only books :)
We sold all apple products and with only a small fraction of the money we received we bought the used equipment which (with some reading and trying) I liberated myself.
All the above wasn't as difficult as it was to remove our dependence in SASS**. All our photos, contacts, calendars, files and everything life or work related was in corporate servers. This was no more acceptable. There was where freedombox*** really helped us.
So as you can see, We are today somehow better in the field of hardware and software freedom.
* https://stallman.org/apple.html
** read more about SASS here: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-serve.html