Hi Noé,
Noé Lopez via "Development of GNU Guix and the GNU System
distribution." <[email protected]> writes:
Hey everyone,
I recently borrowed a Thinkpad Gen9 X1 from the Guix Foundation
(thanks!).
I was expecting the nonfree wifi, which wouldn’t be an
issue. But I was
quite surprised at the nonfree audio!
Any chance I can get some music on it? I suppose the jack port
will not
function, would it work with some usb C headphones, or is it a
“you
don’t have a sound card” kind of situation?
Since the X1 Carbon 7th Gen, these laptops have required Sound
Open Firmware (sof-firmware) for correctly functioning audio. An
increasing number of Intel laptops are also going this route.
My understanding is that, while the firmware source itself is
Free, it’s not usable in practice because the firmware binary must
be signed with a hardware vendor key to be loaded. As such, only
precompiled firmware supplied by Intel works.
I suppose it’s better than opaque blobs with no source, but it’s
equally frustrating, and since a usable binary cannot be
bootstrapped from source, it can’t be included in Guix.
The binary firmware is available in some third-party channels, if
the the situation is tolerable to you. Otherwise, as Ricardo
suggests, USB-connected audio peripherals are an alternate
approach.
-- Ian
