Re: [Trisquel-users] Coreboot & Triquel Computers
And, of course, ThinkPenguin sells "free" computers.
Re: [Trisquel-users] Coreboot & Triquel Computers
Some confirmation from Chris would be nice if he only supports coreboot systems.
Re: [Trisquel-users] Coreboot & Triquel Computers
The problem is the following: there is only one company that makes videocards that run with fully free drivers. It is ironically Intel. For example the x3000 and x4500 have free drivers and do not require binary blobs in the kernel. However, the motherboards that use those videocards run on chipsets that have no support by coreboot. I asked on the coreboot mailing list and that's more or less what one of the devs answered me: "coreboot does not run with this type of chipset. It would require a lot of difficult backwards engineering to make coreboot run on these motherboards. It will not happen in the foreseeable future." So at the moment you cannot run a fully free system, that has 3D acceleration. You either have 3D acceleration plus a non-free bios, or a free bios with no 3D acceleration (a system with an AMD CPU and a Radeon/GeForce card running in a kind of limited mode with free software drivers).
Re: [Trisquel-users] Coreboot & Triquel Computers
Every body is making compromises and we are trying mitigate those compromises. Nobody sells a coreboot compatible laptop for instance. The reason we don't ship coreboot is for the reason Cyberhawk mentions. It is a non-trivial task to port coreboot from one board to another. If we were to finance it (this is not happening in the near future- although is something we would like to eventually do) the board most likely to get a port would be an Intel Atom desktop board. Lets back up a moment though. Why are we not shipping a desktop system right now with coreboot when there are all these boards available. Cost and availability. A board actually has to be supported before it is discontinued. These discontinued boards are significantly more expensive and most people aren't willing to pay 3x as much for a system. Go through that list and point me to a motherboard under $100 that isn't discontinued and supports 16GB of ram. It also can't have an NVidia or ATI chipset. You aren't going to find such a motherboard.
Re: [Trisquel-users] Coreboot & Triquel Computers
Chris and Cyberhawk thank you for the comments. Disheartening. There is over 50 motherboards in that list. They have done quite a lot of work, which doesn't seem to benefit Trisquel or the vendors that sell Trisquel Computers. "The coreboot project was started in the winter of 1999 in the Advanced Computing Laboratory at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) by Ron Minnich." One assumes that something so important to the Free Software Foundation there would be direct efforts by FSF to get important hardware BOISes released under the GPL, or structure financing to have a dedicated team earning their livelihood on this project. To ask a single Linux computer system vendor to finance this on their own doesn't make sense. Not even to work on motherboards that dedicated GNU/Linux computer system vendors such a ThinkPenguin, InaTux, and Los Alamos Computers are currently selling or are planning on selling...they way the project is structured I can't imagine they even asked. http://www.coreboot.org/FAQ http://www.coreboot.org/Contributors http://www.coreboot.org/Sponsors
Re: [Trisquel-users] Coreboot & Triquel Computers
We are trying to solve these issues. Right now we are working on USB wireless N chipset as we feel this is a critical issue. The BIOS is not the only non-free code running and requires more resources than the community could possibly finance at this time. Really- there isn't any way it is going to happen. We have in the works agreements which we hope will significantly increase our revenue. Money is key to getting things done. I think there will come a point where it'll happen. It is going to require adoption by the masses though. Right now even if every consumer purchased a computer from us and no one else we probably still couldn't finance a coreboot port. This is not to say there isn't any other way to finance a coreboot port. It has been done before. I'm not sure who got these laptops or if it was done after the fact (there may not have been any actual users or availability with coreboot installed). I know of one which was financed by a government in Europe (if I recall). Again- this system was not free software friendly. It used an ATI graphics chipset and still had other non-free microcode. This is off the top of my head. Please correct if I have made any factual errors or if you have additional info. The coreboot web site does have a number of laptops which coreboot was ported. Each is not completely free or remotely free software friendly.
Re: [Trisquel-users] Coreboot & Triquel Computers
It is difficult to understand the GNU Operating System's software development model. All the development seems to have been done at no cost to the Free Software Foundation and then the code was released under the GPL (and copyright was assigned to FSF? http://live.gnome.org/CopyrightAssignment How does it make it into the package list? http://www.gnu.org/software/software.html#allgnupkgs or the Gnome Foundation List? Who can decide to relicense/dual license a package). It seems that Coreboot is no exception, programmer charity to support an ideal. Hopefully, one of the Coreboot developers (past or future), or companies sponsoring Coreboot, will reach out and offer their talents and services gratis, in charity, pro bono, to develop mainboards that are desired by ThinkPenguin, InaTux, and Los Alamos Computers. This shouldn't cost any money or require resources from the vendors distributing computers with Trisquel pre-installed. Maybe one of the team at Google Summer of Code could work on this. http://www.gnu.org/links/companies.html http://www.coreboot.org/Sponsors http://www.coreboot.org/Contributors http://www.coreboot.org/Products
Re: [Trisquel-users] Coreboot & Triquel Computers
Contrary to popular belief most of the free code written is done by companies like Redhat, IBM, and others. At least they are paying the developers to write said code. There are other industries which have no interest in non-free code. They contribute to projects like Coreboot. Coreboot is used on servers for instance. There are things you can do with Coreboot that you can't do otherwise. Or not in a cheap and effective manor. So while there are developers being paid they are not being paid to work on porting Coreboot to the hardware we need it on. They are being paid to port it to new server boards and similar. There have been ATOM boards with Coreboot. At least one exists. Unfortunately it isn't manufactured and there is nobody with the resources interested in funding another port.
