Wow, seems late to be harping on Gates. After all, the Microsoft monopoly is what destroyed the IBM monopoly. If it wasn’t for Gate’s business acumen, and IBM’s arrogance, there would never have been the countless PC clones to put linux on. And, if you want to metaphorically call Windows a virus, then how is linux different in that regard? It’s a more beneficial virus, but still depends on proliferating, even moreso. The actions of the “otherworldly LISP Machine” maker Symbolics Inc., is what motivated Stallman to first formulate Free and Open software. And Windows never really made serious inroads on servers, anyways. Mostly Linux just replaced other flavors of Un*x, like Solaris and Irix and, to be complete, also DEC’s VMS. We have 28 years of linux now, and 50 years for Unix mid-March. It gives a very different perspective than just Linux vs Windoze. Think about it!
Wow symbolics had the first dot com domain ever and it - from your account - motivated Stallman to start GNU and i dont even recognize the name.
More on topic - @cuvtixo and @cp289 - for those of us that are either less imaginitive or dont feel like using a search engine -
What projects are you thinking of re: the FPGA?
Is this for cryptocurrency or password ‘recovery’ or for some kind of IoT thing?
just pretend i lost my copy of “What to do with an FPGA for Dummies” and that I am curious.
-non
Please don’t go offtopic here. This is an important thread for many people. Create separate threads to discuss other things.
The problem is that nobody has ported Coreboot to a PC with dedicated graphics in any of the recent chipsets. Google, which does most of the work to support recent chipsets in Coreboot, does not care about dedicated graphics, since its Chromebooks don’t need them. Google also doesn’t need Xeon processors in its Chromebooks. It is asking a lot for Purism to do all the Coreboot porting work for the kind of high-powered workstation that you want.
Look at what boards are supported by Coreboot: https://coreboot.org/status/board-status.html
I will be more careful in the future.
But if I can plug an fpga into my current Librem15 and do certain things, then I dont need to start budgeting for a system76 with massive gpus. That money could go to a librem5 or a mini
Thanks, if I was smarter, I would do it myself, I’ve Ported and polished a few high performance engines, but when it comes to Bits and Bites…I can barely get my LibremKey to work. Now I really wish I would have ordered it, installed at the factory.
Setting up the encryption properly has been a very interesting learning curve in of itself.
I can only imagine what would be involved with setting a machine to Coreboot. That would probably explain why no one makes secure mobile workstations…yet.
Thanks for bringing me up to speed on whats involved, very interesting.
Yes, I was pretty disappointed as well. I have been promoting Purism to those with an interest in privacy, in non paid, in an (unofficial capacity)…
Got 3 friends on board, got them trapped in my office with credit cards in hand and Purism on their screens, ready to order Lib15s… No laptops? Say what?
I flipped it from looking like an idoit, to telling them, “see I told you should have put your orders in last week”…in reality I felt like a fool.
I took them all over to NitroKey and they ordered X230’s instead…not a Lib15 in any stretch, but a solid little machine. For their needs, it will do the job.
Kinda sad when you think about it. I felt a little betrayed honestly.
I love the Purism business concept and I want to do my part to support them in every way I can so we can all have a choice here.
I see that Purism is now making a better effort to communicate. Had I known the Lib 15 was going to be discontinued, I would have ordered more than one.
Growing pains can be a bummer. But I still support Purism and their mission.
ahhhhh, I think you missed the point. I was speaking metaphorically, in a joking manner for those who are prone to read between the lines, looking for Irony.
Gates has moved from a world renowned Geek, reborn into a world renown Pathologist, wanting to inoculate the world from various virus’s and pathogens…I’m sorry, if I offended you, but in my book… windows became a virus, Gates is a snake and I became a Penguin as a result… But now were really getting off point now, so please forgive me folks. I probably pissed off some more folks so I will stick a sock in it and shut up now…
@Kyle_Rankin
I lately noticed, that the product “L15 v4 refurbished” had disappeared from the shop.
Is there an explanation to that?
The guarantee for the latest sold L15 (December 2020) will still last for almost another year - so I guess, there are refubished notebooks in the queue. Right?
I’m still interested in buying …
I guess there are only refurbished laptops in the shop when Purism happens to acquire such a laptop. If they don’t have any then it is better not to annoy customers by advertising something that they don’t have.
That’s a valid concern, but you actually don’t need (or want) a kill switch to solve that problem. There are in fact 3 ways that come to mind to deal with that.
1. Submit patches to the audio stack that prohibit the computer from sending frequencies you can’t hear to the digital to analog converter. Just like good old .mp3 encoding. This helps protect all devices that run Linux distros!
2. Use a digital to analog converter that automatically strips out ultrasound and infrasound. This protects you even if you install windows.
3. If no such thing exists, put some kind of digital filter chip in between the CPU and the DAC that does this.
Can you please elaborate more point 1 for noobs how this can be achived ?
Thanks
Some sort of high frequency filter i.e. cutoff all components of the signal that have a frequency above a certain value. Ideally you can do that in the audio hardware (DSP), otherwise you will be devoting CPU grunt to it.
I don’t think you necessarily want to “prohibit” it. You just want to silently drop the higher frequencies.
Agreed
Would love to see the company having more display and performance models. 17" 4K Matte display would be great with a decent graphics card plus a Gen 11 processor. As for the keyboard, I never liked the single glide pads and end up using the mouse. I miss the two-button glide pads.
I purchased a smaller screen size laptop (coming from a 17" laptop) to take advantage of Librem’s hardware selection. If they do not make one with a larger screen with a 10 key, then I may have to switch to something else. I always wanted a laptop with ECC, and they have those now.
@Kyle_Rankin what is holding me back to consider a Librem 14 is the lack of a 105-keys keyboard.
I would be fine just getting some stickers for the actual layout, but 105-keys is a must have.
Does anyone know the frequency ranges that the L5 mic and speakers can handle? It would be nice to make an L5 program that can detect ultrasounds.
This sounds like a great idea deserving its own thread.