Lack of freedom with beagle boards?

3 respostas [Última entrada]
soy comic
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Joined: 12/17/2016

In a prior topic, I read that Raspberry Pi devices have lack-of-freedom problems, and to check out beagleboards such as beaglebone black.

However, for beaglebone black wireless, a little hunting shows that the TI wireless chip uses binary blob firmware:

https://github.com/beagleboard/beaglebone-black-wireless/tree/master/firmware

http://git.ti.com/cgit/cgit.cgi/wilink8-wlan/18xx-ti-utils.git/tree/hw/firmware

So as an alternative, going for standard beaglebone black + freedom-friendly atheros wireless chip, we then see there is a TI Sitara™ AM3358 ARM® Cortex™-A8 processor in that beaglebone black.

Are there any lack-of-freedom issues with this processor or beaglebone black rev-c?

jxself
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Joined: 09/13/2010

Since you're looking at individual components (like WiFi), then consider the graphics too.

https://www.fsf.org/resources/hw/single-board-computers

Of course, you could ignore the graphics system and not use that. Just like you could ignore the WiFi and use wired networking instead.

So: It all depends.

soy comic
Desconectado
Joined: 12/17/2016

Excellent thought and link, thank you.

The purpose is experimenting with mesh networking. I suspect these beagle boards are overpowered for that purpose, but it seems like it would be easier to use debian for those of us with less low-level experience. So graphics are not a concern, but networking is.

https://gogs.librecmc.org/libreCMC/libreCMC/wiki/Supported-Hardware is probably the right place to start, then?

ADFENO
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Joined: 12/31/2012

See [[https://www.fsf.org/resources/hw/single-board-computers]], altough
that page tells me that it's best to use the non-wireless one.

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