On Thu, 2010-01-07 at 14:22 +0100, Rubén Rodríguez Pérez wrote: > I didn't know the XO required non-free drivers. Where can I find more > details on this?
The driver is free, but it uses non-free firmware, which in the past has been causing us all sort of trouble. Ironically, the Marvell chip is codenamed "libertas": http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Libertas Since Marvell refused to open the firmware, Deepak and Cozybit have been working on a replacement firmware, called thinmac: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Libertas_Thinfirmware_HOWTO Besides the wifi firmware, most of the XO-1's power management is done by the EC, an Intel 8051 co-processor: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Ec_specification Sadly, the EC firmware is proprietary. Quanta, the copyright holder, refuses to release any information on it, let alone the source code. There was an effort to rewrite a free version of it, but it looks like it's been swamped: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OpenEC http://dev.laptop.org/git/projects/openec BTW, the Lemote Yeeloong notebook, which is supposed to be the most free netbook on this planet, contains the same EC chip of the XO-1. It probably runs yet another proprietary fork of the Quanta firmware. The situation improved greatly over the last 10 years, but there's still a lot of work still to be done by those who do care about freedom in computing. -- // Bernie Innocenti - http://codewiz.org/ \X/ Sugar Labs - http://sugarlabs.org/ _______________________________________________ SoaS mailing list [email protected] http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/soas
