On 05/21/2016 12:53 PM, intrigeri wrote:
Hi,
Zlatan Todoric wrote (21 May 2016 10:24:37 GMT) :
Intrigeri being my friend, and Tails being used by Edward Snowden during the
whistleblow, I already talked inside company to add it to our offer
Excellent :)
but the issue
here is that people seem to be usually using tails on USB drive for only live
usage.
If you can create OEM installation for us, we would be happy to add it to our
offer
(I already asked Debian to do this and they will provide it). Benefit is that
from
every Librem sold with Tails, Tails community would get donation from Purism.
We don't support installing Tails on internal drives, and we actually
have code in place to ensure that Tails won't load from there
(https://tails.boum.org/support/faq/#install_permanently): the idea is
to enable users to _not_ trust whatever may be on the hard disk of the
machine they're starting Tails on. So an OEM installation on the
SSD/eMMC isn't an option, I think.
*However*, I see that the Librem tablets will have a microSD card
reader. Assuming that it's left free, and that the firmware is able to
boot off a microSD card, then I think that booting Tails on a microSD
card is the perfect solution, both for users and for you folks: from
a UX perspective, this allows one to leave the USB port available for
other use cases; and from your perspective, this allows to ship
tablets with _both_ Tails and PureOS, thus leaving the choice up to
the user to pick whichever they need at each boot, all this for a very
small additional cost :)
Sounds good, I'll be sure to dive a bit deeper into that.
If you want to go this way, we'll need to look into the details
regarding how to properly install Tails on a microSD card, in a way
that scales up to many devices. Some problems need to be tackled in
this area, but nothing impossible.
Now, we do have certain reservations regarding shipping preinstalled
Tails (https://tails.boum.org/support/faq/#preinstalled), so we would
need to find a way to communicate clearly to the users 1. who they are
trusting (or not) when they use the Tails that comes installed on the
aforementioned microSD card; 2. how to re-install Tails on that
microSD card, in a way that avoids any such trust issues (we have
pretty good doc for that). The way I see it, it's a mere matter of
communication, but other project members might feel differently.
Still, there's the freshness problem given we release every six weeks,
and I doubt that your supply chain can guarantee that only up-to-date
Tails are shipped to the user (and even if that was possible, the
shipping delay can be enough to make it untrue again). Thankfully we
have quite user-friendly automatic updates, so this problem isn't as
bad for microSD as it would be for preinstalled DVDs.
We have assembly partner in California where we actually assembly our
products - so I think while we provide them new images, they would be
able to do it (of course they aren't OS people so we would need to teach
them, but nothing impossible).
Zlatan, will PureOS for this tablet include any additional driver,
firmware or kernel patch that's not in Debian, e.g. for touchscreen,
sound, backlight, 3G and various sensors?
Nope, PureOS is based on Debian testing main and my task was to find hardware
that
can satisfy that request (even though supply chains like to make mistakes, we
would
just refuse and continue our research and work on it).
Sounds good, thanks for clarifying! So yeah, that could be the first
tablet I see with proper hardware support on Debian and Tails (modulo
the Wi-Fi issue discussed below). Lovely :)
Regarding 3G and other
cellular things - we made space for them but of course they will not work until
FLOSS
gets there and than we would be able to enable such things without "forcing"
people
to buy new devices.
OK.
In particular, the section about "Freed Wireless AC Driver" makes me
wonder: until that driver is freed, how exactly can one use Wi-Fi with
a Librem tablet?
The wireless is the same as in laptops, so the connection will be N, thus free
driver. Stretch goal is to free AC (ath10k particular here in mind) as N is
unstable
and not the best (if you move 10m from AP there is a good chance you're loose
connection).
Hmm, OK. That's somewhat suboptimal, even though one may of course
plug a USB Wi-Fi dongle in (keeping in mind that a tablet with
a protruding USB device is somewhat less usable). Are 802.11b and
802.11g affected by the same stability problem?
Pretty much yes, you can try with different protocols (wireless card
should be able to emit them all except the ac one) but, most users live
happily with their Librem laptops even with this flaky WiFi connection.
Other solution would be to find the guy who worked on ath10k (as he left
company AFAIK) and ask politely to help us on this issue ;). Btw, I have
seen some pretty small WiFi dongles if people have issues with it
(notice we now also offer Librem laptops without wireless card for
people that want airgapped devices).
Cheers,
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