--- crowd-funded eco-conscious hardware: https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68
On Mon, Apr 25, 2016 at 2:07 PM, Paul Boddie paul@boddie.org.uk wrote:
Debian is available for mipsel.
... but debian isn't FSF-Endorseable, because it's made far too easy to install non-free proprietary firmware, and the practice is generally supported and accepted by the debian community, actively mentioned on the website as being possible, and many many other things that are completely and directly at odds with and in contravention of everything that the FSF stands for. technically and specifically: the default debian archive keyring includes by default the GPG keyring for the "nonfree" repository.
that having been said, debian is a first step. if debian works, then anything else will as well. if we made a special GPG archive keyring package where "nonfree" was specifically excluded, then that would be a reasonable first step towards making it possible for debian to be FSF-Endorseable.
If it weren't, I wouldn't be able to put it on the Ben NanoNote (jz4725) and there probably wouldn't be any cross-compilers in Debian for mipsel, either. I can't say much about the desktop stack here because the Ben doesn't have enough memory to run something like KDE. ;-)
yehh but it's fuuuun, i love the nanonote.
There's been a discussion on the FSFE discussion list about this, with someone advocating the POWER architecture for high-end products as an alternative to x86(-64). I think people are realising that they might need some other irons in the fire.
great! yes, there's a powerpc laptop team out there.
http://mail.fsfeurope.org/pipermail/discussion/2016-April/010912.html
oo that's quite an interesting discussion. if you get a chance to mention again that there's a MIPS (jz4775 with 2gb RAM) CPU Card in the pipeline, and that the whole exercise is just to be able to drop in better CPU Cards later, that would help enormously. also that i've been speaking recently to Josh Gay, and he says they're really excited about the whole EOMA68 libre laptop concept.
l.