It's not a SoC, just a board, like many other boards with some free
design files.
After reading
https://olimex.wordpress.com/2015/06/05/how-to-get-in-the-news-tell-people-that-you-will-make-and-sell-something-which-cost-you-20-for-9/,
I assume it won't be sufficiently available to be useful to
It's Ralink, it has nonfree wifi firmware. (The chip documentation
shows how to upload the 8051 firmware from Ralink.)
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There are only accidentally free software-friendly SoCs. Intel,
Allwinner, AMD, etc are not free software friendly, but some of their
(older) products can be used without nonfree software.
Allwinner licenses many parts from other vendors, they wouldn't be able
to release some code (like Mali
This is one of the reasons why the Expires header is used (for libraries
on CDNs, not tracking scripts/images): the CDN knows that you downloaded
the library, with one referer per year, the browser doesn't contact them
if you visit another page using the same library. If enough sites that
you use
Among libreboot-supported computers, the Thinkpads are technically much
better. (Both have user-unfriendly vendors.)
Macbook 2,1 has much smaller battery capacity, gets hotter, its webcam
needs nonfree firmware, you might miss some keys and the right touchpad
button. The libreboot maintainer
No one needs OpenH264 built from source: they can use ffmpeg/libav/x264
instead. I think we shouldn't consider the Cisco binary free, when it's
mostly used for the binary-only patent license.
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I remember reading such forum posts from John Bridgman several years
ago.
The argument assumes that no one can reverse engineer that firmware.
This is false: Nouveau developers replaced much firmware with other
custom instruction sets, and found security issues in NVIDIA's firmware.
At least some
These drivers are free, but they need nonfree firmware.
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Trisquel 6 and 7: it's correct. (I think maybe 4.0 had KMS enabled,
4.0.1 disabled it.)
Unblacklisting works on pre-R600 cards. (R600 was released in 2006.)
R600 and some newer cards worked with some kernel versions, but not the
current ones.
The firmware are various blobs included with Linux
The radeon driver worked in Trisquel 6, so it supported 1366x768. The
vesa driver supports only modes specified by the VGA BIOS, usually
1024x768 is the largest. (Radeon kernel mode setting works with
pre-R600 cards only, while the X driver requires it in the version used
in Trisquel 7.)
See
e.g.
https://trisquel.info/en/forum/trisquel-70-flash-disk-and-amd-raedonlimited-resolution
for how to make the radeon kernel module load.
To make it really work, this needs downgrading the driver to a version
with user space modesetting, fixing the current kernel driver to work
without
Are AMD blobs better than Intel blobs? There is no source for any
significant CPU initialization code for them. Other sources mention
lack of suspend/resume resulting from AMD wanting to require signed
blobs for it.
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Proprietary graphics drivers usually have a free part in the kernel,
this one has too. limedriver.org aims to replace the nonfree userspace
part.
Check if you can find sources for files listed at
https://github.com/96boards/documentation/wiki/HiKeyGettingStarted.
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http://inatux.com/ lists two computers. Both have AMD APUs with
integrated Radeon GPUs, which work either showing a black screen and
hanging the system (if KMS is enabled), or with the vesa driver which
probably doesn't support the native resolution of the screen (necessary
for wide or LCD
See any post about AMD GPUs on this forum. Their computers are not
free software compatible and their BIOS is not free.
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It's listed at https://www.gnu.org/links/companies.html next to a seller
of laptops with Intel wifi requiring blobs. I already reported these
bugs to GNU Webmasters several months ago.
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USB has +5V, ground and two differential data pins. There is no +12V.
Wires are usually coloured, red for +5V, black for ground.
Reading the manual or using a multimeter should answer your question.
You might also trace to which pins the wires go.
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How is it different from hardware implementing backdoors in circuits,
with no firmware?
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The GPU starts and initializes the main ARM CPU. It is libre if you
don't connect power to it.
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JavaScript is Mozilla's implementation of ECMAScript, and a common name
for it. There is no technical difference.
jQuery is free.
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There are games with free software parts and nonfree data. Here you
will have additional difficulties with redistribution of this data
(noncommercial is very poorly defined, fair use depends on
jurisdiction, companies sue people regardless of law, etc). Being
pretty tolerant is different from
Decide what is your threat model?
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See e.g. https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=456037. The
package is old (added to Debian in 2007 with no newer release), it makes
non-portable assumptions that prevent it from working on 64-bit systems.
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LibertyBSD has shown two problems with what you propose: we need to
trust the author first that they are able to write and release the
program, and this method of funding prevents any cooperation with other
people on that software.
Not all crowdfunding campaigns use threshold systems (which have
Choose old Intel systems (i945 and gm45 can work with free boot firmware
and without Management Engine firmware which implements AMT). (TPM is
just a mostly useless chip, it's harmless.) If you choose AMD, you
should decide if their signed blobs are sufficiently harmful. You won't
avoid having
The 7-Zip GUI uses WxWidgets, it is available on non-Windows systems
too. Parabola has it.
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Ucclia development started before Jessie was frozen. Several
contributors checked which packages from Parkes need
changes/blacklisting in the Wheezy-based release in March 2014 (more
than half a year before Jessie was frozen), I don't know if there are
any earlier public dates for the work being
Have you checked if both laptops have the same regulatory domain
configured? Channels 12, 13 and 14 are available only in some
countries.
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It's x86, has the usual AMD blobs and might work without them. There is
a GPU (Radeon) integrated in the APU, but no graphics connectors.
While there is coreboot support, it's not integrated upstream.
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It might have previously used a different card. It wouldn't be nice if
the numbers were determined by the random order in which the devices are
detected, so the software remembers which MAC address belongs to wlan0
or wlan1. Other udev configurations make it name the devices after the
physical
I'm skeptical of just coreboot or Skype-replacement development
succeeding at freeing users' computers. You need nontrivial skills to
flash coreboot (unless it's on a sufficiently old system where someone
provides trustworthy binaries, like Lenovo does), and to use the
Skype-replacement you need
They write about run[ning] unsigned BIOS code. Chromebook and
Thinkpad users can easily do this by flashing a build of upstream
coreboot.
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Why not install it or the build-essential package?
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Flash chips used for boot firmware usually have a write protect pin.
It might be possible to configure it to make only some regions
read-only, so e.g. information needed to support resume from suspend to
RAM can be written.
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They endorsed it,
https://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/ryzom-free-software. (I refer to
that article also as their endorsement of Wine.)
Accessing their world is not like knowing that there is a program that
isn't distributed. It's more like using someone's computer for our
computing, or
RMS does not care about the freedom to study, modify or commercially
distribute nonfunctional works which do include fictional gameworld
data.
It's not SaaSS, since you cannot play a multiplayer game alone: this
needs network communication with a server/peer controlled by someone
else.
(No
http://www.parabola.nu/https/ explains this for the Parabola domains.
Write to d...@lists.parabola.nu if you don't like their policy.
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A SoC is a component used in e.g. single-board computers. Practically
this means that no Samsung Exynos SoC is acceptable for fully free
software systems (therefore no boards using it are acceptable), while
there are acceptable (at reduced functionality) SoCs used in boards
having bigger
Phones, tablets, laptops, set-top boxes, routers, etc.
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Do computers with nonfree and signed Samsung Exynos bootloader and preinstalled
nonfree software promote what we aim for?
Any specific Intel backdoors that you know to work without nonfree
software in the boot firmware flash?
I personally like boot firmware being in writable media: I fixed some
bugs and applied fixes done by others to the one in my laptop. If it
was readonly, the laptop wouldn't be useful without
This means that you cannot use the backdoor, not that the PCH works
without the multimegabyte blob that can be also used for AMT.
(Chromebooks have no AMT, while the Intel ones have at least a 1.5 MiB
management engine blob.)
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I really don't believe porting an FSF-endorsed distro to an ARM board
would be hard. The two main problems are: lack of appropriate boards
(no FSF-endorseable ones, the developers are not interested in porting
to something less free; I think also some high-performance ones are
needed for native
Install libav-tools, use avconv instead of ffmpeg the program. Some
time ago ffmpeg was forked into libav and ffmpeg, some distros choose
one, another or both, Debian-based distros have libav.
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Use dpkg-query -L libav-tools if you are unsure what files a package
provides. avconv is the program that does what ffmpeg did; avprobe and
avplay replace other programs.
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The lines you added to /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf are like
blacklist rt2800pci or just the module names? It needs the
blacklist keyword. Your card is handled by 2800pci, the firmware is
loaded by rt2x00lib.
You might need to run update-initramfs if the module is loaded by
initramfs, I don't
Two more examples of malicious scripts: ones preventing the user from
reading more than five articles per month, and ones showing full-size
ads for mobile apps when browsing on a phone browser.
Usual ad-blocking addons should handle these, while they might need
changes to disable only a part of
I wrote a SaaSS app (fully free software, with available source and the
server running in user's office). Without JavaScript for its user
interface it would be unusably tedious and slow to use (I tried when
developing it; it still isn't as good as it could be due to my limited
experience with
Ok, use the browser with different URLs and invent a new method of
updating the software. (And rewrite the server-side part to provide a
more orthogonal API. Think how to justify having the server or deal
with installing a TeX distro on user's computer...)
I'm not using user scripts for things
ZIP is free and has popular free implementations. Recent software
handles big archives (see ZIP64). 7z produce smaller files at slower
compression and bigger memory usage: decide what's important if you can
install software there.
On Unix-like systems tar archives compressed by gzip (same
Have you subscribed to the list before posting the patch? In my
experience mails rarely leave moderation queues, while mails from
subscribed users are usually accepted without moderation.
I believe only Ruben can significantly improve the current development
process. The new GitLab instance is
It's an old enough Radeon for the approach from
https://trisquel.info/en/forum/trisquel-70-flash-disk-and-amd-raedonlimited-resolution
to possibly work: unblacklist the radeon module from /etc/modprobe.d,
run update-initramfs -u and reboot.
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The problem is that LibreJS requires adapting all sites using free
client-side JavaScript code, or whitelisting all such scripts in LibreJS
(they have a whitelist for several popular JS libraries). Has changing
all of the Web worked for any other project?
Big free software projects have open
If you replace its nonfree VGA BIOS and revise the name to not use a
noun + noun construction, then yes.
If you call it hardware working with a free operating system, then
it's completely clear what is ok and what isn't. (E.g. AMD cards
aren't, while NVIDIA cards that ThinkPenguin sells are ok,
None are free hardware that you can study, share/modify designs of and
manufacture. h-node lists devices that work with a fully free
operating system and ones that do not.
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All of these reports are incorrect, people either think that llvmpipe
provides GPU acceleration (it uses the CPU instead) or use the nonfree
firmware.
Find a way to improve h-node.org documentation to prevent such mistakes?
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A user reported this issue on the IRC channel several days ago, then
mailed it to RMS (who reminded us of it at least on
https://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/gnu-linux-libre/2014-10/msg7.html).
Known obvious freedom issues open for 1.5+ years after the developer
decided that they need to be
Do you know what free hardware is? Some NVIDIA PCIe cards have 3d
acceleration with Nouveau working with Trisquel.
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h-node.org lists only hardware that its users tested and reported
there. All printers supported by free drivers (without nonfree
firmware) at versions included in Trisquel should work.
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Loongson 3A is slower than Core 2 Duo in my X60t. All 3B boards listed
at http://www.loongson.cn/devsys.php have AMD GPUs, same as for 3A.
Making custom laptops for 100% free systems is not practical unless you
can sell many thousands of them.
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Parabola for the YeeLoong is not bleeding edge, it's unmaintained with
mostly broken and obsolete packages. gNewSense is the only FSF-endorsed
distro with current support for MIPS.
In my experience, YeeLoong 8101B used ~12W of idle power. Several ARM
single board computers will use much less
No graphics will work on that board unless you use blobs in boot
firmware (and maybe a discrete PCIe card which stores them in a
different chip), then only the VESA driver will work unless you use a
non-libre kernel with more blobs (or a supported PCIe non-AMD card). If
you are getting it because
X60 is supported since a coreboot developer spent much time reverse
engineering one chip (needing expensive equipment). All other parts
were supported earlier, since the German government funded i945 support
(which used documentation from Intel and needed many months of work).
For a present
We can request sufficient information so we could verify if the firmware
is needed. Nouveau supports NVEx, this one might be true if they write
that they use Nouveau and not the other driver.
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I haven't found any obvious blobs in the drivers, it looks free. Check
if it works and supports the features that you need: someone who has
that hardware should be able to tell you, and that it is being
maintained and won't get orphaned while you use the device.
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Description:
Loongson is an independent implementation of MIPS with different
internals, they do license MIPS from ImgTec for naming and patents.
They plan to use Vivante GPUs in their future devices, not PowerVR.
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There are no changes in what free firmware is included in Trisquel 7.
There are two ways to replace firmware: reverse engineer it and write an
independent free replacement, or convince the vendor to release its
source under a free license (needs a business argument like a large
order if the
I upgraded to a Lenovo X60t (with coreboot and L7400 Core 2 Duo CPU),
it's much faster.
Loongson 3 computers use AMD GPUs which need nonfree software. Graphics
is slow even with the GPU driver using the nonfree firmware. Support in
FSF-endorsed distros is mostly dead, mainline kernel support is
There are several other CPUs used in X60/X60s/X60t, like L7400 (64-bit
Core 2 Duo). Every board needs a different coreboot/libreboot build:
X60 and T60 need different while they have the same chipsets and CPUs.
Northbridge (i945), southbridge (ICH-7) and EC are more important than
CPUs for boot
https://viaembedded.github.io/docs/epia-p910-user/drivers.html#linux-driver-support
suggests them having nonfree drivers, I don't know what free drivers
exist for the GPU in VX11H (Openchrome lists it as unsupported).
For free boot firmware: the chipset is not supported in coreboot,
depending on
PowerPC, not supported by Trisquel (might be easy to port: Ubuntu
supports it). Significantly different than libreboot-supported
computers discussed in this thread.
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Libreboot is a distribution of coreboot (without nonfree software), grub
and several other packages and their configuration. Libreboot has
binaries for specific computers that work without other blobs in their
boot firmware flash.
If you install coreboot, you should read its wiki and
Probably only libraries that work with other init systems too.
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None of these mean that a coreboot binary that you build will work.
Red/green means if someone published logs from a working build. Device
pages have more info on what works or doesn't and sometimes list
required blobs.
Macbook 2,1 has webcam that needs nonfree firmware, other parts work
with
If I understand your question correctly, you want a system with
everything free except for the BIOS. I.e. just something that works
with Trisquel out of the box with all needed features, like ThinkPenguin
computers (that also use money to support free software, not like
vendors where
Most users do not change boot firmware of their computers. Trisquel is
better for their freedom and privacy than Ubuntu.
TPM is just mostly useless, it has no security issues. There are other
worse components, like Management Engine that on all recent Intel
chipsets (optional since i965,
That documentation refers to release 6, beta 6. Older versions have
different scripts.
Do you have tools for recovery if your build fails to boot?
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Virtualization software might support passthrough of PCI devices,
handling the physical hardware in guest (KVM does support it). If the
host driver doesn't handle the device, the guest can.
The kernel has no restrictions on what modules or drivers can be used,
the provided modules are modified
What AES mode does it use? Why would one use it instead of a more
common program using a more popular encryption library?
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What block cipher mode?
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Interesting choice, seeing the comment about it being older I expected a
pre-Nehalem CPU, not Sandy Bridge.
Why MIPS and not ARM for future products?
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Lemote support is relevant if you can get Loongson CPUs and want their
outdated distros. Projects like WebKit and Mozilla have much more
support for ARM and there are now standard SIMD instruction sets
supported on ARM: there is existing video acceleration on CPU, while
it's mostly missing on
You want a miniPCIe card with Atheros wifi and non-Atheros Bluetooth
(since Atheros needs nonfree firmware). I don't know if there are such
cards.
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Samsung tablets have their own proprietary connector, with an adapter to
USB. It won't work with the ThinkPenguin wifi device: it needs 300 mA
of current (or more?), while the tablet provides only 100 mA (200 mA
with custom kernel). Maybe it would with a powered USB hub (unportable)
and
rt2x00 has 2KiB to 8KiB of 8051 code. ath9k_htc uses 52KiB to 72KiB of
Xtensa code. Old Broadcom cards (reverse engineered) had a custom
instruction set and ~96 KiB firmware (?), new ones are 200-600 KiB of
ARM code. Intel is 148KiB to 692KiB, probably custom ISA. Marvell
Libertas has 120 KiB
Disassembling is allowed in the EU in specific cases, these might be
enough to write a free driver. I don't know how it's done in other
jurisdictions. People who reverse engineer firmware for other devices
do disassemble it. All firmware with free replacements has nonfree
licenses, it's not
Where is that Lenovo spyware located: in BIOS or firmware of another
chip? I know two related issues: spyware in their BIOS (replaced by
coreboot/libreboot) and ME firmware in all models since X61 (while only
X60 is supported by libreboot), this one is different.
Avoiding laptop manufacturers
Unless we want free boot firmware, we should choose option 2, boycott
Apple and Lenovo. If we want free boot firmware, we need laptops
similar to ones for which hard reverse engineering work was done, like
Lenovo X60 or the Apple laptop using similar chips.
A modified Lenovo laptop being the
Install the build-essential package. Compilers aren't generally useful
without other development packages, like headers for libraries and other
tools. They take space while they can be easily installed.
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It will make a black screen and no graphics on some newer GPUs (Debian
disables it for R600 and later if the firmware is not provided,
h-node.org has reports of newer cards having no graphics on Parabola).
A recent kernel change worsened it. On my RS690 laptop (older than
R600), modesetting
Newer Radeon X driver versions require KMS, I think the one in 7.0
does. If you have the radeon kernel module disabled, there will be no
KMS and hence the VESA driver will be used, giving only 1024x768 and
800x600.
Enable the driver by commenting the blacklist line and running
update-initramfs
Usually with LUKS.
https://code.google.com/p/cryptsetup/wiki/FrequentlyAskedQuestions
question 2.4 explains this. LUKS provides metadata (e.g. what ciphers
it uses), supports multiple passphrases used to decrypt the master key
and is more usable. Plain format has specialized uses like encrypted
Yes, developers of nonfree programs normally recommend other nonfree
programs. Use cryptsetup or ecryptfs. They are free, integrated and
since 1.6 (in Belenos) cryptsetup can access existing TrueCrypt volumes.
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I use Parabola on a server. It previously had Arch's initscripts: the
most buggy, unreliable and hardest to use init system that I know. It
required big shell scripts for starting a daemon, often failed stopping
them and left old ones running, so configuration changes wouldn't apply
to the
Many shops in Poland do this, often with order-specific account numbers.
I think it's ok, especially if it means paying only when it's certain
that the order can be fulfilled. Payment when receiving a package is
common here too.
(I haven't ordered the adapter discussed here, while it makes me
20.000 means 20 + 0/1000 in English, 2 in some European
languages. 20,000 is Polish for 20 + 0/1000, the same might be in
other European languages. It might also mean 20 and 000 as two
numbers. (I haven't checked how many packages there really are.)
CSM doesn't do the hard and machine-specific work that's needed here.
http://uefidk.intel.com/content/minnowboard-uefi-firmware-eula states
that The CPU and chipset initialization code is currently provided as a
binary module which is consistent with usual Intel support for coreboot
(MRC, FSP)
Some of the files at http://mtjm.eu/releases/lp2014/ contain it
(room141.ogv.4 to room141.ogv.6). The stream quality is very bad for
this talk and it's probably incomplete.
The FSF will release a hopefully better recording some time after the
conference.
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Old ATI firmware is freely licensed (under an MIT-style license like the
driver), while there is no source code nor documentation available. We
don't know what instructions there are nor what it exactly does, so we
cannot study nor modify it as easily as AMD can. New firmware (some for
R600, all
See http://hg.python.org/cpython/file/default/Misc/README.valgrind for
an explanation of some errors and ways to make using valgrind on python
more useful.
Why is this language leaking so much memory?: there was no leak found,
still reachable is ok. Exiting a program frees all memory that it
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