I was browsing the net, and jumping from link to link I've come to
discover Leemote Yeeloong, the holy grail of computing: the portable
that is entirely open source. The article does not mention anything like
it, meaning even the BIOS is free. Only drawback: it's a MIPS. Would
Tails run on it? Would Tor run? My check seems to give negative answers.
And distrowatch lists only a Debian and Gentoo as usable on MIPS from
the Linux distros. BSD is better, but I have no experience with BSD.
Also, do you know other hardware that is entirely free?
The older Leemote Yeeloong is probably 99.99% free. The newer one is not.
It's got non-free dependencies for the graphics if you want to be able to
take full advantage of the hardware.
You can get an everything except the BIOS (and microcode) free system from
libre.thinkpenguin.com. There is full support for Trisquel. Trisquel is
one of the few actively maintained user friendly distributions completely
in compliance with the Free Software Foundation's guidelines.
Here is a complete list:
http://www.gnu.org/distros/free-distros.html
Parabola GNU/Linux is also actively maintained. Not as easy to use though.
Some of the others I'm not so sure about. gNewSense is suppose to have a
newer release at some point here although it isn't kept sufficiently up to
date and has been traditionally haphazard. It was an early completely free
distribution.
Ultimately it would be nice to see a 'real' laptop (not a netbook) with a
non-x86 CPU as it means there is a chance a completely free system can be
developed. ThinkPenguin might do that if the demand builds to warrant it.
There are lots of problems with moving away from x86 unfortunately.
In the mean time I'd suggest looking at x86 with intel graphics only (no
NVIDIA/INTEL hybrid or ATI) atheros wireless. At a minimum avoid HP,
Toshiba, Dell, Lenovo/IBM as there are restrictions on the wifi card
slots. You can't swap cards if (and when) there shipping with non-free
dependent chipsets. There are also issues with the CPUs implementing
digital restrictions now. While you can check each CPU it's quite frankly
a lot of work. I'm a big advocate of promoting commercial enterprises like
ThinkPenguin, eztakes, and others which are free software friendly. I'm
not a fan of promoting companies that are Linux friendly. There doing
more harm than good.
* I'm the CEO and founder of the one company above.
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