desktop computer from ThinkPenguin and emails in general

First off, you should move to free software on the software side. Hardware is a problematic part because there isn't much alternatives here if you really want 100% freedom. And ThinkPenguin doesn't sell such hardware, only the company is commited to freedom. This means in practice that the seller (you will meet him here under the nickname Chris) chooses regular HW components that will work with a fully-free operating system, but anything beyond like free BIOS is out of scope.

Coreboot is a software project that has the goal to replace the proprietary (aka non-free) BIOS mostly by reverse-engeneering, but now it's backed by AMD, and the main developers of the project are funded by Google to work full time on support for the Chromebook line of laptop computers. There are many motherboards supported by this project, but even if you will choose to buy one of them, you will still need to replace the BIOS, which is not something anybody can nor will to do. Firstly because it's a complex procedure which requires some knowledge, secondly because it may brick the hardware if not handled carefully. I've never done this before so I cannot be for any help here.

I think whether your HW is free software compatible or not, it's a good starting point for elimination of the non-supported components, so that when you change your operating system for a free software one, you will get such features as 3D acceleration and working WiFi (the two most problematic, yet easily solvable issues). Please, share with us the complete technical description (i.e. list of hardware components) of your current desktop so we will see what can be improved/replaced.

I wouldn't trust paypal a cent of my money, they're notorious. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paypal#Criticism

Coreboot is not completely free on all hardware, but LibreBoot is. For now however only ThinkPad X60 is supported. http://libreboot.org/

Congratulations for liberating yourself!

Congratulations Aprendiz_de_linux for liberating yourself; It is, indeed, a very hard process.

If you miss "good" video games you can ask mYself; he knows a lot about very awesome free as in freedom video games.

If you want to know about free components, you can consul this web-page:

http://h-node.org/

Thanks mYself, lembas and a_slacker_here!
I learned a bit more thanks to you guys. On the h-node site on the section "search" >>analyze the output of the lspci command>> lspci -vmmnn, my hardware is:

Intel Corporation
Device: 4 Series Chipset DRAM Controller
SVendor: ASUSTeK Computer Inc.
SDevice: P5Q Deluxe Motherboard

later found that command line > lspci ,is more easy to understand so:

Intel Corporation 4 Series Chipset DRAM Controller
USB controller: Intel Corporation 82801JI (ICH10 Family) USB UHCI Controller
Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801JI (ICH10 Family) HD Audio Controller
PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 PCI Bridge
IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801JI (ICH10 Family) 2 port SATA IDE Controller
VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation G94 [GeForce 9600 GT]
Ethernet controller: Qualcomm Atheros AR8121/AR8113/AR8114 Gigabit or Fast Ethernet
IDE interface: Marvell Technology Group Ltd.SATA II / PATA Controller
and that Firewire i dont know what is it.

And on lsusb:

Logitech, Inc. Webcam C310
Hewlett-Packard ScanJet 4370
Logitech, Inc. M-UAS144 [LS1 Laser Mouse]
Jing-Mold Enterprise Co., Ltd (i dont know what is it)

Although we have a printer Epson xp-600, and found by Trisquel it couldn't print anything, just some letters MMMM 2// MMMM on the left vertical side of the paper A4. On Ubuntu and Opensuse it did well, i suspect that printer has proprietary things.

I have made a list to build a pc, of course this list is not definitive just an idea:

CPU- IntelCore i7-4770k 3.5 GHz
Motherboard - Asus z87 Pro LGA 1150
CPU Fan- cooler master hyper 212 Evo
Video Card -EVGA Geforce GTX780 Ti or Sapphire R9 280x06 3GB DDR5
SSD - crucial M500 240Gb
HDD - Western Digital Blue 1Tb
Power Supply- seasonic M12II -620
Optical Drive- Samsung 24x Sata DVDRw
Ram- Crucial Ballisic Sport 16Gb
Monitor ???

i took that litst on http://elitegamingcomputers.com/top-gaming-computers/#19

Although this morning i talked with my friend and he advised me other configuration and unfortunately i forgot to note on paper, and much more cheap than these component's list. Now i am awaiting for his reply mail to send to me the hardware list we have choosen to me this morning.

This configuration was of course to think about good games so my step to go to free software has deleted that previous thought. Maybe it is not necessary for gnu-linux such a system and using much more years than 5 years (re)cycling components.

On my older pc has a windows7 mounted in it and the hardware is:

manufacturer: ACER
cpu: Intel (R) ATOM (TM) CPU330@ 1.60GHz 1.60 GHz
Memory RAM : 2.00 GB

I dont know how to see more the hardware on this one. It is basically this description on panel controls>hardware.
I notice that using windows7 on this pc is more and more slow. So i will format it with GPARTED, blanking hard drive and installing Trisquel. But i wish to learn how to format a hard drive via terminal.I am going to move step by step to free software and now is the time to pratice terminal way :D ..lol...
Thanks in advance :)

You need to decide whether you want to liberate you current setup, or opt for a new computer before I can help. Until then, here's my advice (in points):

* To list hardware components on Trisquel, it's easier to use a graphical tool like I-Nex.
* From what you have written, I recommend you to keep the graphic card (GeForce 9600 GT), and probably the network card (I cannot be sure until you provide more details).
* Do not buy any current nVidia/AMD card because all of them require the proprietary NVIDIA/Catalyst binary driver to get an appropriate performance.
* You should also provide info about what processor and network card model you currently have.
* Buying a new computer is useful only if you want to improve gaming performance (you should clarify first what games are you going to play).
* The printer problem needs further investigation, and should be discussed separately once you decided about the computer itself.
* If you wish to install Trisquel along with your current installation, this will also need to be discussed separately since there are many pros and cons about this.
* The choice of monitor depends on what model do you currently have, and how you're (un)satisfied with it.

Please stop mixing other specs (the bottom one) here that has nothing to do with this thread, because this will lead people to confusion and only make them angry, leaving you without help. Be always exact about what you have, and what you want. If you're not, then ask for some advice first, and only when you decided should you go for the next topic.

I understand. Thank you mYself. I will see that program I-Nex you talked about and later post here the hardware components.

Alright! I hope i make no mistake now... Here go the hardware components that i have:

CPU:

INTEL - (R) Core(TM) 2 Quad CPU Q8200
2003.000 MHz
Integrated GPU: NA
Data from the manufacturer: TDP:65w PPS:45nm Socket: Intel Socket 775
Memory support: DDR1, DDR2, DDR3

GPU:

Nvidia Corporation G94 [Geforce 9600 GT]
OpenGL vendor: nouveau
OpenGL renderer: Gallium 0.4 on NV94

Motherboard:

ASUSTeK Computer INC.
Board version: Rev 1.xx
Board Name: P5Q
Bios - American Megatrends Inc.

Drives:

Device vendor: ATA
Device model: Hitachi HDS72101

Memory:

Total: 4035 MB

Network:

ethO
Qualcomm Atheros AR8121/ AR8113/ AR8114 Gigabit or Fast Ethernet

What i Want:

I want to play STAR WARS THE OLD REPUBLIC, GUILD WARS 2, The Elder Scrolls IV Oblivion, Mass Effect, Dragon Age Origins and Dragon Age Awakening under the GNU-Linux avoiding as possible proprietary things and playing in a fluid way.
As you can expect from these games, my style of game is third person, adventures games, with action and immersive storylines.

If this is not possible at least i want to have a powerful hardware to chess analysis, using 4 cores and 8 threads because i play chess and i like to see analysis. I can make sacrifices for the first group of games but i will not dismiss chess.
I hope it is more clear now what i want and going to the second step of the resolution of this issue.
Thanks for your holy patient mYself :P

Thanks onpon4!
I will see those games. :)

Here are some more advice. Again, in points:

* From the processor specs I can easily say that a hardware upgrade would be benefical for you since your current model was manufactured around late 2008, while Intel started integrating their GPUs on the processor die with the introduction of HD Graphics in 2010. Thus you need to rely on the graphic card until you'll buy a new computer. If you'll buy a new Intel processor, avoid models including the vPro/TXT privacy intrusive functionality.
* You need to decide whether you should buy the new components now, or rather wait for the next generation Intel architecture codenamed Broadwell, that's (according to Wikipedia) expected to be available in "the fourth quarter of 2014, with mass shipments in the first quarter of 2015". Although this isn't important, it's interesting to see that Broadwell adds VP8 hardware decoding support.
* There are many great free software games that may be interesting for you (we can discuss this more broadly later). The most prevalent genre for which there are more than enough games for are first-person shooters. The second most common ones are strategy games. Some of the most graphically advanced are Penumbra: Overture (2007), and Doom 3 BFG Edition (2012).
* Whether you will get rid of your current desktop or not, you should still keep hold on the nVidia graphic card that might come handy in situations, where the integrated graphics are not supported by the game/application you want to run.
* From what I now read, the ethernet looks to be integrated on the mainboard, so your computer might not contain any network card at all (this can be confirmed only by opening the computer case, and listing the components by manufacturer name, and model numbers).
* About the listed games, if not MMORPGs, they're all look to me proprietary. And they require a pretty decent graphic card for smooth playablility, which requires a hardware upgrade. For you to be able to run Windows games on Trisquel, you will need Wine, respectively PlayOnLinux, or some kind of emulator like Dolphin. Since the graphic drivers aren't on par in performance with Windows, and these games will run non-natively, you need to expect problems.
* Since you are going to play games, I expect you should also want quality audio output from your computer for an immersive audio experience. If you do care about this, I recommend you to buy an external DAC. I can recommend you the Objective DAC (see section "Prices and Ordering") by NwAvGuy which provides the best price/performance ratio among DACs currently on the market. This is a great starting point in your audio chain (a quality amplifier, headphone/speakers are also needed).
* If you're going to buy a new SSD, I recommend you to take the Samsung 840 series into consideration. This model while MLC based, provide comparable endurance to the TLC based models, which means they are practicaly indestructible in real-life use, no matter how much or intensively you will gonna use/write to it. The review at Anandtech should provide you a good insight into this.

I'm just going to answer the ThinkPenguin specific questions in the initial post and/or questions regarding out of country purchases.

There are no duties for importing laptops/desktops into Portugal. There is a 23% tax that is not advertised on the ThinkPenguin site, as it is specific to Portugal, and many other countries have there own taxes as well. It doesn't matter if your receiving the goods from the UK or from the US. The only difference is if the price is advertised with the VAT included or excluded. That is if we shipped from the UK it would simply be advertised at a price 23% higher and then no taxes would have to be paid on receipt. Because the laptops/desktops are excluding the VAT and shipped from the United States the purchaser has to pay the tax on receipt of the goods in this situation (where the goods are purchased from ThinkPenguin).

Some countries like Brazil have an actual duty and that means that a person who wished to purchase a laptop/desktop not only has to pay the normal tax within the country, but they also have to pay an additional amount. This is what you would refer to as a trade barrier. It costs more to purchase the goods directly from a company overseas than to purchase indirectly through a local merchant. The reason for duties is to encourage local manufacturing and ensure profits go to merchants within the country. It is also to keep foreign businesses from gaining an advantage over local businesses. Unfortunately such duties only hurt smaller foreign companies and not larger foreign companies because the larger companies simply setup shop within the country. It in fact hurts local businesses too because now they have to import the goods and then re-assemble the goods that were already assembled overseas, tested, etc and disassembled all to avoid the duties. That increases prices for consumers and reduces the profits of the local businesses. If your going to hand money out to promote job growth this is a really bad way to do it. It would simply be better to increase taxes and promote small start-up technology companies.

Will mention one more thing. The desktops/laptops are compatible with free software distributions like Parabola GNU/Linux-libre and Trisquel. No matter what system you get you will have some pieces of non-free code. There are pieces of non-free code hidden in keyboards, hard drives, and elsewhere. The BIOS is just one component that is a problem. As was pointed out coreboot isn't necessarily 100% free with all systems its loaded on.

The solution to this problem is focusing resources. Randomly purchasing hardware doesn't create any incentive to develop free software or push for the release of free software from companies upstream, or provide for the resources for any company to move barriers. As it is random purchases of hardware simply further entrench companies which are already dominate, and don't care about free software.

Nobody is going to listen to one individual, nobody is going to listen to a small company, but combine those individuals and a single large company can create an impact. Right now there are lots of individual all demanding free software, but nobody is listening, as individuals are too small to be noticed. You have to create a roar for change to happen. Show them there is money by merging resources (buying one or a small handful of freedom-only products) and there will be a company that can make an impact.