* Paul van der Vlis: >> (I got an OS-less laptop some time ago for much less than $500, but I >> don't know if it is CoreBoot-capable. > > But can you buy it now?
This particular one? Probably not. There's another one for 250 EUR, though. > And was it sold to you with the information that it works fine with > Linux and with open source drivers or did you see that later? I don't know anymore. I naïvely expected it to work, and it did. > There are very many laptops, but very less salesman do you tell that it > works fine with Linux and open source drivers. The first piece of hardware I bought which advertised Linux support was an ATAPI CD drive which had a firmware bug which caused it not to work under Linux, it required a workaround which was only part of the proprietary Windows driver. > When you would want to buy a new consumer grade laptop, which one would > you buy? I think you don't know ANY new laptop what works fine without > testing and a risk on problems. In Germany, if you buy from an online retailer, you can return it if it doesn't run with GNU/Linux (I hope, I'm going to find out soon). > For me it's my job to sell laptops with Debian. I have to test laptops > very carefully before I can sell them. Many consumer modells have new > versions after 6 weeks, then you have to test again. Yes, that's a problem. It's also annoying that they change essential aspects of the user experience without notice, such as the keyboard. >> Obviously, there is also tons >> of firmware running on other chips besides the main CPU.) > > There is some, but I think the SSD is a critical place. Worse than the CPU? Come on. > I've said there are no open source SSD's. That's not correct: > http://www.openssd-project.org/wiki/The_OpenSSD_Project > https://code.google.com/p/opennfm/ > https://github.com/lightstor/ssd-controller You could go with straight NAND storage and a wear-levelling file system. Some early Linux-based devices did that. _______________________________________________ Discussion mailing list [email protected] https://mail.fsfeurope.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion
