I suspected as much with the wifi card. If you could send the link it will save me some hunting which I’d appreciate. Thanks heaps.
Here are some quick steps I wrote for adding the non-free repo. I wrote them in the context enabling Bluetooth on Librems, so the last step of installing firmware-atheros might not be relevant, but if you know which wifi card you have, I’m sure it wouldn’t be too hard to find which package you need to install.
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I wish I had known that when I was setting up my PureOS VM. That sounds like the issue I had.
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Thanks for the tip re drivers. I have put this away now for later reference. I honestly don’t think I’ll be changing over to Pure OS for the moment. I have been giving it a run in the past couple of days and there’s just not enough ‘wow factor’ for me to set up three pcs for. I will purchase their laptops however as I read a great comparison of Pure and System 76 elsewhere and Pure have features that appeal to me.
I will also commend the Pure support where I have also been asking a few questions that have been answered promptly and politely. The whole feel of Pure and their goals resonant nicely with me.
I have achieved what I set out to happen, I have OS working now in VM and one laptop which I’ll investigate further. But thanks everybody who helped. Great community. Pure are doing good things. Living in Australia where we have the worlds most invasive privacy laws makes these endeavours all the more important and crying out for support.
Now to order my Librem 5!
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UEFI is FOSS. You can find their source code here, which include a demo UEFI firmware, OVMF.
Many firmwares are not fully FLOSS, through. However, it is not UEFI, it is the vendor, and intel. It has nothing to do with UEFI. Even librem devices need certain binary blob inside their coreboot firmwares for now.
This would have been great to know yesterday before I spent 8 hours trying to install on a Dell. I did try the legacy options but the BIOS on the Dell I was working with Sucks! Is there a list of brands or computers that it will work with? I am trying to set up PureOS for a friend of mine. She is going to buy the Librim phone as well.
Thanks
For a flawless, out-of-the-box experience, PureOS will pretty much only work with Librem laptops and some older Thinkpad models. However, most things (aside from WiFi) should be more or less functional if you have successfully changed to Legacy BIOS mode, disabled SecureBoot, and disabled Windows’s Fast Boot, as João said.
However, if the computer has a discrete graphics card, particularly Nvidia, then you might also struggle. Using various Linux distros on hardware with nVidia graphics cards, I’ve often had to add the nomodeset boot parameter in order to get to a point where I can then either disable the graphics card or blacklist the nouveau drivers.
I have had Pure OS installed on a couple of Dells and it required a bit of wrestling. Its your call of course, but for me Pure just didn’t offer me enough to set up on all of my pcs. I decided to just stick with Distros that worked out or the box on the Dells. Which is pretty much all of them really. Pure is and exception. Pure is a more than serviceable OS but not that much better for me to wrestle with it like some windows installs I have had the misfortune to encounter.
I don’t agree that the Dell bios sucks. Pure has its own requirements that makes the installation not as straight forward as other distros, but seriously, forums and google are your friend here. I never had a drama just getting Pure to boot from Legacy tap a few keys (as I outlined above) and its installed. IT does have issues with the Dell such as wifi and graphics which can be tricky but manageable. In the end you just make the decision as to how much you want Pure. I have Ubuntu systems installed and have ordered a Librem 5 and I don’t anticipate any major problems with devices talking to each other when I get my phone.
If your friend really wants Pure OS I’d consider buying one of their laptops if they can afford it. Then it will problem-free I’m sure. That’s where I’m heading.
None that I know of. For what it’s worth, this worked for me on a Dell Latitude 3570. Bluetooth didn’t work but from what I’ve read Bluetooth doesn’t work out of the box on a Librem so shrug
Does anyone tell me what is better than ubuntu?
Maybe its faster?
There sort of is no “better” in an objective way in my view. Its up to you and what you want from the distro. I’ve tried countless distros and am biased toward ubuntu. Mind you, I don’t ask much from a distro. Just web, email, music/video playback, a bit of word processing stuff. Most of my computing is at work where I endure win 10.
As for speed. I originally settled on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS on our Dell Latitudes (6320, 6430 and 6530). I customised it with how I liked it and things were good. Then I tried the latest Zorin 15 release and the speed difference on the Dells was significant enough for me to change to Zorin and I couldn’t be happier. Zorin was also MUCH easier to network as well. It is based on Ubuntu so the change over is painless.
My advice is to download some distros in live mode and see what works for you. I don’t believe there is a “better” than anyone can tell you about beyond their own experience.