On Tue, Dec 1, 2015 at 9:31 PM, Nico Rikken nico@nicorikken.eu wrote:
Great to see further progress. Keep it up!
:)
At the Dutch T-Dose conference had a couple of visitors at the FSFE-booth mentioning how great it would be if finally a totally free laptop would become available. Have referred them to this project because this seems the only sensible approach to reach this ultimate end goal, and because it shows just how difficult it is to achieve this goal in a voluntary effort.
in a word... yes. i had to make some... interesting design decisions shall we say - going for example with a custom 3D-printed case instead of attempting to work with china-based factories [who will not respond to enquiries for anything less than 10k orders, because they know the cost of injection-mold casts]. and that took 6 *MONTHS* to complete the [15] parts needed, which is just a staggering amount of time - waay more than i was expecting.
keeping it simple - going with USB2 not USB3. cutting out all hard drives and using USB or MicroSD storage. finding a low-power 15.6in screen (sub 5 watt). keeping the power consumption to under 15 watts so that a single-cell battery charger IC could be used instead of needing multiple cells (which wouldn't fit into the casework design anyway)...
a whole boat-load of details all of which basically steer things in ways that you might not have considered at the outset...
Getting a fully free laptop is certainly easier set then done.
yeah. there's quite a few efforts popped up in the past year, including http://www.powerpc-notebook.org. they're going to run into the same challenges, and i hope that they have the good sense to read the reports of the experiences i've encountered along the way, just like i read the experiences of the openpandora, the kosagi laptop and other projects and learned from those.
Furthermore I couldn't help but notice that one of the most restricted laptops in the world is being used to create the most free laptop in the world.
*sigh* i knowww... it's rather unfortunate that the higher perceived quality of the proprietary software means you end up with a highly profit-rich company that can afford to purchase the best components and make the highest quality hardware products. first thing i did though was blow away the OS, install rEFInd, and boot up debian. i'm not interested - at all - in the proprietary OS, i want a hardware product with an exceptionally high resolution screen, light weight, good build quality, and high specs all round for the money.... and now that i've got one, i won't replace it for 5-8 years.
at the time i _did_ try to buy an IBM laptop... their web site failed, at the time, however, preventing and prohibiting me from giving them any money!
later on i'll be able to tackle creating high-end hardware - not entirely sure about how to go about that, yet. have to see what SoCs are available in 5-8 years time, as well as what display output standards become commonplace.
i can say that i am most certainly *NOT* going to be buying a smartphone. ever. i bought *nine* HTC hand-helds back around 2002 to 2005, i was one of the early reverse-engineers working on removing wince from HTC phones and replacing it with openembedded-built GPE/Familiar based on Angstrom Linux. so i've made the decision: i'm not going to own another smartphone - ever - unless i've made it myself.
laptop/workstation however.... yyeah, i have to have something otherwise i can't get anything done at all!
l.