If I want to hack on Libreboot on a separate machine from my primary one, what's a good laptop to get? Are there laptops that are close to working but not on the HCL yet?
Chromebook C201 is very recent (currently sold new), supercheap (<$200), and can run not only Libreboot, but completely blob-free. Not even CPU microcode is needed.
I put libreboot on an old 2006-era X60s, and it wasn't too much trouble once I'd worked out which instructions to follow and which ROM to use (which was not obvious). That appears to be the best supported laptop, and you can pick them up very cheaply on EBay.
While I agree that most BIOS and/or UEFI installations are just... unacceptable, I don't think that a replacement will do just fine. The initialisation process should be as streamlined as possible, but allow as much control as possible. I would not call a multi-staged boot process "streamlined", when you argue that coreboot is the fastest way to boot up a computer. And then again, the whole process is repeated by the operating system one way or another. Anyways, I'm glad that coreboot exists regarding the UEFI fuckups in the recent past, but I don't think it's the way to go further.
Oh, and, the free in libreBoot is just cosmetics, so I shrug, whatever.
That's exactly the point. If their existence doesn't change anything, why do they exist? Extra control, transparency? But no extra functionality for/with the hardware? So, why the alternative?
Most of their supported machines (including at least a few of the Thinkpads they support) look like they can't be flashed "online" from the OEM firmware. For that hardware, their documentation says you'd have to disassemble the machine and flash the firmware externally.
Obviously, this requires specialized hardware, but it's not completely insurmountable if you're really determined to run the thing.
The laptop repair shops I've seen in Shenzhen offer a BIOS reflashing service that involves using a long cable with a small clip on the end that connects to the BIOS chip. They usually reflash to OEM, to fix "hard bricks", but might be willing to flash an image you provide.
Their laptops are cheap and with good configuration except for CPU and graphics card. I will have hard time running Matlab on such a machine, so I cannot make that investment. Better CPU please especially when your laptop is 2.2 kg in weight.
I would not recommend their services at all, although I own one of their products.
Leah is extremely unresponsive, when I ordered mine it took over 2 months for it to be shipped with no prior indication of this (it should've taken at most 3 weeks to arrive at my home), and any email response from Minifree took at least 3 weeks.
Oh, and Leah billed me UK taxes instead of Dutch taxes as per the EU webshop rules, so that was a lot of fun when I had to file my taxes.
The shittiest customer experience I've had in years.
I've read the "PayPal" [1] section of the website (linked at the top as "Screw PayPal" and got the impression that its a work of individuals with childlike tantrum prone personality and not someone you'd do business with professionally.
Your description of the experience only nodded in the same direction.
Regarding the taxes (referring to the EU only), Minifree didn't do anything wrong:
If you buy hardware as an end-consumer, you're being billed the taxes of the originating country (in this case, the UK).
That's different for most services, e.g. if you ship a laptop to Minifree and they just flash it and send it back, they have to bill the taxes of your country. If they do any of it differently, they're doing a mistake.
There are other companies that can provide you with Libreboot, blob-free coreboot or other libre boot solutions on your Thinkpad if you're unhappy with their service (according to your experience that seems to be an appropriate response).
Minifree doesn't stand for the quality standard for the whole "libre community" as Albert Heijn (a supermarket chain) doesn't set the gold standards for the whole supermarket industry.
These laptops require a dedicated programmer, and they're the most up-to-date laptop models that come without remote manufacturer backdoor ("Management Engine").
I won't have the time to set this up myself soon, so I went ahead and bought one. It's my rainy day laptop.
> It is extremely unlikely that any post-2008 Intel hardware will ever be supported in libreboot, due to severe security and freedom issues; so severe, that the libreboot project recommends avoiding all modern Intel hardware. If you have an Intel based system affected by the problems described below, then you should get rid of it as soon as possible.
You are right. I did not read the whole part. There is more to it though.
> Intel is only going to get worse when it comes to user freedom. Libreboot has no support recent Intel platforms, precisely because of the problems described above. The only way to solve this is to get Intel to change their policies and to be more friendly to the free software community. Reverse engineering won't solve anything long-term, unfortunately, but we need to keep doing it anyway. Moving forward, Intel hardware is a non-option unless a radical change happens within Intel.
> Basically, all Intel hardware from year 2010 and beyond will never be supported by libreboot. The libreboot project is actively ignoring all modern Intel hardware at this point, and focusing on alternative platforms.
It seems highly unlikely that someone who made the effort flashing Libreboot to their laptop or buying a librebooted laptop from a supplier, would install proprietary software (Matlab) on their laptop because that misses the whole point.
Making some performance concessions and receiving something wholly libre in return is fine for the target audience.
I was actually thinking of giving LibreBoot a try until all this drama broke. Now it just seems like the personal soapbox of a particular individual, which doesn't inspire a lot of confidence in its viability (especially given how ambitious it is).
Try coreboot, it supports more boards and is the actual upstream project. Libreboot is just a set of patches that removes support for boards that require Intel Management Engine and rips out microcode updates.
Was the transgender employee fired because she was transgender, or was she fired for some other reason? It is really hard to tell unless there is a court case on it.
If you remember Ellen Pao claimed she was fired because of her gender, and it went to court, and the only proof that they had for anything was that Pao was bullying others and being a bad employee with performance issues.
Transgender people need to be treated with respect and dignity, but if they don't perform well they will get fired like anyone else.
I don't like the drama either, but it happens from time to time.
Well, we don't really know all of the facts but it apparently wasn't a problem when she was hired, wasn't a problem when they highlighted her for Lady Ada Lovelace day, and it wasn't a problem that kept FSF from giving her a senior job title. FSF obviously isn't going to comment on the matter but Leah Rowe at one point claimed on the libreboot website that the employee that was let go had said that it was fine for Leah to raise cain over it but that was reverted not long after it was put up. Leah also claimed to be taking the high ground to avoid naming names and then promptly turned around and claimed that three individuals at FSF were misogynistic and that they should be fired immediately.
I don't have enough data to make anything but FUD from it.
There are many reasons that someone could change their mind and decide to take different actions than they have before. Either way it is clear that some form of 'bad blood' has arisen and that things are now divisive. Unfortunately I don't know who I can side with on this issue due to the lack of data.
In my mind, I really don't even see any reason to believe that there is significant bad blood between the actual employee that was fired and FSF. The only side of this story that we have is Leah's and she's already outed the ex-employee, slandered 3 people in every way she can, and either the fired employee changed her mind about supporting Leah's actions, or Leah made that up as well.
At the very least, I think we can conclude that the FSF and the fired employee are unhappy with Leah's actions.
People who've worked at the FSF say it is very progressive and open to transgenders. The idea that they would fire someone for being trans is just outrageous.
The claim isn't exactly that: "A transgender employee at the FSF was being harassed by a transphobic colleague for being trans. The trans person, not the bully, was then fired when they stood up for themselves, because it was seen as trouble making while the bully remained silent."
Your source for that is from Leah Rowe who has proven in this situation to be untrustworthy. Read the discussion on `gnu-prog-discuss`[0]. The employee being trans was not the issue.
Yes, my source for the claim is the author of the claim. And I cited it to point out that Leah Rowe doesn't claim that just being trans was the issue, but that it was the fact that the employee spoke up against the bullying.
It makes no sense. FSF treats employees better than most companies and are very open minded as well. It is very progressive and open to GLBT people, etc.
I think it is some sort of politics, like trying to attack Linus because he rejected some SJW's contributions to the Linux Kernel because it caused a Kernel panic and asked if she bothered to test the code before submitting it. Then he is accused of being sexist towards her because he used cuss words.
Didn't Linus say something along the lines of "I don't care about your gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or whatever else, except the code you submit"? That seems to be his attitude toward such things.
I love how "free software" rails against the anti-freedom of "open source software" and then fails to carry that libertarian spirit through letting people decide for themselves what to do with their own bodies and not judging them for it.
On the other hand, the problem with claiming "I'm being biased against!" is of course twofold: One, any noncisgendered-white-male employee can claim it even if the main problem was a lack of productivity. Two, when I feel unwelcome, my optimal response is to just leave instead of suing those I feel unwelcome from (with the added assumption that it is very hard to change people's preferences for other people, and that there's a certain amount of "dealing with the way things are right now instead of forcing them to be otherwise" acceptance available.)
Nobody likes drama queens, not employers and not employees. Just go, I say, and find a welcoming environment. You're not married to a software project.
Yeah, it's long past time to reconsider whether GNU's ideology is actually working - if you have an organization that's dedicated to "freedom" that's firing people because they receive too much harassment, something has gone wrong.
I've been of the opinion for many years that GNU is delivering something more like "freedom for people who are in our situation." There's the counterintuitive effect where moving things from hardware to firmware, i.e., enabling (at least in theory) the end user to change how their computing works, makes a system less "free" in the GNU definition, because the standard for measurement is how computers used to be. There's the fact that GNU has never prioritized the web platform (possibly because Stallman doesn't use a web browser, and instead emails URLs to a server that replies with a lynx -dump of the page, reading the response when he checks email the next day), and so, one, there's very little support for a freedom-respecting web browser, and two, there is basically no attempt at solving the JavaScript trap, on the grounds that not running JS is better. There's the complete lack of an ethos on cloud computing other than "Don't," despite the fact that GNU comes out of the university environment where all your computing was controlled by someone else, namely the university sysadmins.
So, ultimately, there's a long history of the GNU folks not anticipating ways in which people have their computing freedoms infringed and basically going "Well you're doing something wrong, stop doing that." It's sadly quite unsurprising that the same ideology means that when an employee is harassed in a way that the executives haven't personally experienced, they assume that the employee must be doing something wrong.
>Yeah, it's long past time to reconsider whether GNU's ideology is actually working - if you have an organization that's dedicated to "freedom" that's firing people because they receive too much harassment, something has gone wrong.
There is no proof has been disclosed indicating the person fired was for receiving too much harrassment and with the responses of the rest of libreboot devs I don't think such a thing happened at all.
>There's the fact that GNU has never prioritized the web platform (possibly because Stallman doesn't use a web browser, and instead emails URLs to a server that replies with a lynx -dump of the page, reading the response when he checks email the next day), and so, one, there's very little support for a freedom-respecting web browser,
> and two, there is basically no attempt at solving the JavaScript trap, on the grounds that not running JS is better. There's the complete lack of an ethos on cloud computing other than "Don't," despite the fact that GNU comes out of the university environment where all your computing was controlled by someone else, namely the university sysadmins.
> So, ultimately, there's a long history of the GNU folks not anticipating ways in which people have their computing freedoms infringed and basically going "Well you're doing something wrong, stop doing that."
RMS agrees with you! From his Reddit AMA a while back [1].
All in all, I think it is a mistake to defend people's rights with one hand tied behind our backs, using nothing except the individual option to say no to a deal. We should use democracy to organize and together impose limits on what the rich can do to the rest of us. That's what democracy was invented for!
> very little support for a freedom-respecting web browser
I mean 15-20% market share for Firefox doesn't really sound like much but it's much better than the 2% that Linux has.
> possibly because Stallman doesn't use a web browser
Not that it really matters in this discussion but that's not really true anymore. He supposedly uses Firefox with Tor.
> not running JS is better
He's not exactly wrong. Just from a security perspective alone, would you feel comfortable running random binaries downloaded from the internet? You're putting a lot of faith in your browser's sandbox. Outside of F/OSS libraries most JS on the web is proprietary. The LibreJS [2] project is something that's supposed to counteract this (and I support it on my site) but it's beyond niche even in tech circles.
Down-voted. When we criticised Eich, there was so much noise that the only thing which matters is his technical merits. So how is the developer and his or her attitudes relevant now? Why the double standards?
