From the Purism crowdfunding campaign: "The Librem 15 is the first high-end laptop where you are in control and have complete visibility into the kernel, the operating system, and all software."
It seems like the Novena came first and is substantially more free/open. A laptop running all open source software is still good, but it's not as pure as claimed.
Novena has the bottom-up approach of Bunnie saying "oh here's a cool chip. I'll build something around it and see how complete it will be in the end."Purism seems to say "Let's make a machine that lives up to everyone's expectation, and let's try and remove all closed source blobs from it". They are going the top-down way of stripping an X86 machine from all its secret firmware.
I doubt they'll be as successful as Bunnie was with his approach when it comes to making a "clean" device with no dark and shady corners. (Or for that matter, even as clean as the Coreboot X60.) In turn, the Purism device feels a lot more desirable to me. Let's see if they can make it happen.
I am not a CPU designer, so could someone explain the threat model of cpu microcode? Is it plausible that you could fit memory scraping code, including code that interacts with OS network drivers, all inside the cpu microcode without causing catastrophically impact on performance?
You don't need to - all you need is code that says if you're processing data and you see this special sequence of bytes, start executing whatever follows it as kernel-level code.
This would be comparatively simple - you're just looking for a sequence of bytes and, if you see it, updating one or two registers.
Then you just need to get the special sequence followed by your exploit into the target's memory, which is trivial. Send them an e-mail, embed it in a picture of a cat and post it to reddit, stick it on the end of a gif in a banner ad, whatever.
If you check for the special sequence on the fast side of a fast/slow interface (like the interface between RAM and on-die cache) the speed impact would be all but invisible.
In addition to michaelt's comment, it's worth noting that security issues are only one of many reasons to prefer free software - at least in the opinion of the GNU crowd they are appealing to.
It's fused to accept a non-signed BIOS. Microcode is separate and, considering how tight-lipped Intel is about it, almost certainly won't be customizable in the foreseeable future. (Unfortunately.)
It would be amazing if Novena or other projects like it evolved into something resembling Google's Project Ara, but for laptops instead of phones.
Laptops have unfortunately never really achieved the modularity and ease of modification that PCs have. They are seemingly perpetual slaves to cost, form factor and all the concerns that follow.
The Novena is pretty good in that its schematics are entirely open source. It also has plenty of expansion headers, a FPGA, removable RAM and wifi cards. However, I don't think modularity is as important, because it's hard to make something modular, performant, AND low cost. If you have the sources, you can always make a customized version to suit your exact needs yourself, without the need for it to be modular.
I have a feeling that modularizing (at least in Ara fashion) cutting-edge GPUs and x86 processors is no small feat. Never say never, but it seems unlikely that form factor could be maintained, let alone heat and interconnect requirements dealt with, when simply boxing up existing laptop or PC hardware.
It's likely that a lot of custom engineering and partnerships would be required beyond simply containerizing existing hardware. On the other hand, the trend toward things like on-die GPUs (and more) is promising, but at present you can't achieve truly top-end performance via this route.
The ideal then, I suppose, would be able to just easily snap together the equivalent of a few GTX 980Ms, sprinkle in a few i7s for good measure, and simply have it all work. Going on a trip and feel like packing light? Just take one of each, casually snap off the rest with little hassle.
Of course, if internet connectivity keeps improving at its current pace, application streaming may obviate the need for all of this, but who knows.
I'm interested if anyone has any insight into why there is a such a push for "Free" software (for example by the FSF, Richard Stallman), but not also "Free" hardware.
I've been wondering about this myself. My guess is that the utility argument of open source has culturally occluded the freedom arguments of free software. There's a reason we call it open source hardware and not free hardware.
In the DIY electronics community, when someone suggests building an open/free professional tool (e.g. oscillscope, power supply, etc.), everyone responds "you're crazy, it would be too expensive, you'll never beat the cheap Chinese supplies (like Rigol) on price". Right next door, you'll see people who go to insane lengths to study and after-market hack the very same hardware. Hacks that would be both massively easier and more accessible if the hardware was open. (I'm thinking in particular of a thread on EEVBlog where a guy completely desoldered and resoldered (!) his Rigol oscilloscope to reverse engineer the front end.) I think the Novena is an awesome counter-example to this argument and I hope more people take on projects like this. (I would if I had the skillz.)
It probably has a lot to do with the difficulty of modifying existing hardware. (That is: people don't often think about modifying their hardware, so they simply don't pay much attention to its design.)
From the linked article: "Because copying hardware is so hard, the question of whether we're allowed to do it is not vitally important. I see no social imperative for free hardware designs like the imperative for free software. Freedom to copy software is an important right because it is easy now--any computer user can do it. Freedom to copy hardware is not as important, because copying hardware is hard to do. Present-day chip and board fabrication technology resembles the printing press. Copying hardware is as difficult as copying books was in the age of the printing press, or more so. So the ethical issue of copying hardware is more like the ethical issue of copying books 50 years ago, than like the issue of copying software today."
I'm a little surprised and disappointed by this answer. It seems like all four of Stallman's four essential freedoms of free software apply to hardware: to use as you wish, to study and modify, to distribute, and to distribute modifications [0]. Only the freedom to distribute is mitigated by the cost of copying hardware. The others all seem like an active battleground for end-user freedoms, and the freedom to distribute will be more important as both design tools and fabrication technologies become cheaper.
There is a push for open source hardware, but it is a substantially smaller movement. The Open Source Hardware just formed a year or two ago: http://www.oshwa.org/ The movement is growing, but it appears to be around 15 years behind software, and maybe not growing as quickly as OSS did.
What? When Linux was first released, the FSF had already written and released a ton of free software under the GPL, including Emacs (first release 1985), gcc (first release 1987), free versions of the unix command line utilities, etc.
Partially offtopic, but looking at the case of that laptop I wondered if I am the only one that slides them to the right to have the touchpad and the spacebar aligned with the central symmetry axis of my body? That means having 2/3 of the screen to the right of my eyes, which is a waste because I end up piling windows with important information to the left, for not having to tilt my head to the right.
I believe that the reason for that (IMHO) ergonomically poor design is the will to include the numberpad. With the exception of Macs it's difficult to find any 15+" laptop without a numberpad. Is that feature so important? My numberpad lies there unused since I bought my zbook 15 one year ago. Maybe if I were playing games I would find a use for it. I write specs or code, so there are no many numbers I must type and it's easier to reach for them on the row above the letter keys.
How about optional cases without a number pad and centered keyboard and touchpad? I'd pay an extra for that (plus another extra for a 16:10 screen, but that another story). Or maybe people wanting a number pad should pay an extra. I wonder what are the numbers for the two groups of people "I must have a number pad" and "I don't use it".
Every non-programmer/IT person I know want a `numberpad`. It's really easier for them to type numbers and when they happen to use my laptop and have to type numbers they really struggle with the shift keys.
Which keyboard layout is this? I've used a few and always had 1-0 directly on keys.
I personally find number pads infuriating; I just don't really get it. It seems like something of very limited application, useful for only those who spend hours per day inputting numbers solidly and not much else. What's the use case? It seems like that amount of manual data entry would be slowed down by error checking much more so than the input stage.
The old Italian keyboard (last seen in the 80s) was like that. It was qzerty too. Numbers moved to the unshifted position and Z and W swapped place.
From what I see at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyboard_layout there are very few keyboard like that now. I'd go with a number pad myself if I had to use one of them. On the bright side, if the US keyboard had shifted numbers the keys !"£$%&/()=?^ won't be shifted and a programmer might actually be using them more than numbers.
Funny thing is that some of the keys `!"£$%&/()=?^` still require some shift or dead-keys combination with the french/belgian layout (and the french belgian and french layout differ slightly as well).
Yeah, I don't find the number pad at all useful, yet there it is on virtually all laptops. The last decent laptop that didn't have it was the Lenovo W530. But the latest version, the W540 has the number pad too. Sigh.
I just want a halfway decent laptop with a 15in screen, without an optical drive or number pad. But paying Macbook Pro prices feels like a punch in the gut.
Configuring the W540 you mentioned identically to the base model 15" RMBP ($2000) costs $1850. RMBP is ~ 1 lb lighter and .4" thinner, has a faster SSD, and gets about 3 hours more battery life. W540 has an optical drive, a removable battery, and a workstation graphics card. (Surprisingly, though, raw performance of that seems to be pretty similar to the Iris Pro 5200 in the RMBP, based on my minimal research.) In any case, $150 doesn't seem like an unreasonable difference to me, particularly considering Apple makes actually usable touchpads. (Reviews seems to indicate that the W540 touchpad is as bad as such things usually are.)
Yeah, the 'workstation' class laptops from Lenovo and Toshiba are a bit pricey.
In general, depending on what you want to give up, you can get a i7, 15.6in 1080p screen, 16GB RAM and SSD for a little over $1000. That's with a discrete graphics chip and not terribly good battery life, because it is a mid-range gaming laptop.
I've actually been looking at refurbished Macbook Pros too. Still thinking about it.
>I wonder what are the numbers for the two groups of people "I must have a number pad" and "I don't use it".
I would be willing to bet that the first group is much larger than the second group. Anecdotally, it seems to me that the people who don't use the numberpad are touch typists, for whom the cost of moving their hands off the home row outweighs the benefits of having numbers spread out in a line. People who hunt-and-peck, on the other hand, seem to appreciate the spatial locality of the numberpad.
You may also be interested in a project a number of us have been working called lowRISC, aiming to produce a fully open-source SoC in volume using the RISC-V instruction set architecture. http://www.lowrisc.org/
I haven't looked at RISC-V much; a quick glance at the ISA spec makes me think it has 32 GPRs? That is nice to see, as with Power slowly fading and Sparc essentially dead, we are stuck with the somewhat more constrained x86-64 and ARM.
SBCL, for example, uses 2 stacks in its precise GC, as it will use one stack for unboxed integers and calling out to C, and another for lisp objects, which should be the roots for the GC; on x86-64 it uses a conservative GC for this reason (on ARM they implemented the precise one, but seem to be losing significant performace due to register pressure).
In general 16 registers seems to be "just barely enough" most of the time, which translates to "super painful" the few times you could use more.
Yep, it's got 32 GPRs, with #0 hardwired to the constant 0.
And the lowRISC project is looking into adding two tag bits with a focus on practical security for languages like C, but with the ability to use them for things like GC.
Largest nits I see about the RISC-V ISA is no support for integer math error checking aside from divide by zero (a New Jersey design), and per a slide set I found for the January workshop, the work in progress 64 bit VMM mode will only support 43 bits of address space, i.e. "only" 8 TiB, vs. e.g. the 256 TiB of x86-64. Which of course is rather a lot, but I find it uncomfortably close to the DRAM you can put on current systems with Intel CPUs; I've watched this game way too many time in my career.
It's from a slide set, the first draft of RISC-V's "Privileged ISA Specification" is still being worked on before initial release, which is supposed to happen RSN.
I'm assuming it's the virtual address space limit.
I'm surprised no one has said this yet but I can testify that a numpad keyboard on a laptop is like the worst ergonomic design that is somehow currently still popular. It's one of the things where I literally cannot comprehend how someone would think that it is ok.
I can testify that I would not buy a laptop without a numpad, it's in my opinion absolutely essential. I literally cannot comprehend how someone wouldn't want one.
That's cool and all but the thing that rustles my jimmies is that most non-Apple laptops have numpads. If it were 50/50 I would not complain, I complain because it's hard to find a good non-Apple laptop without it.
That's a fairly compelling argument, but I definitely have had times where I wished for a numpad on my Macbook, mainly so that I could play games that required them (I went through a few months where I played through several traditional roguelikes, and this isn't uncommon in that genre, though vikeys is more common and far better IMO).
On a similar note, I've recently become very interested in buying a Lemote laptop. It's exactly the tiny form factor I'm looking, runs an open MIPS chip, and comes preinstalled with some version of Linux, though I'd probably load Gentoo as it's said to work quite well. The various models run $150-300 in USD depending on the supplier, from what I can tell.
Unfortunately it's very hard to buy these computers in the US, and I will probably have to pick it up on some future trip to China. I would definitely a Massdrop or crowdfunding campaign to send purchase a set from the Chinese distributor.
After it became clear their fraud department was not interested in resolving the problem and was trying to stall beyond the chargeback window, that's exactly what I did.
The chinese sale page is here, I think it is official site (well, actually it says group-buying rather than sale, but maybe just sales gimmick): http://www.loongsonclub.com/gw/, it's 379 rmb. I don't know whether you guys in US or somewhere outside China get any transit companies that they can buy something for you in China, and then send it to you. Off topic, as a guy lived in China, I really can't understand why are you interested in something like that...
Who validates the silicon and how is this accomplished? We've known for quite some time about the potential for rogue circuits hiding amongst the millions of transistors.
From the website: "There are also hardware components, like the HD or SSD, that are flashable, and therefore upgradeable, but that currently run firmware that is not yet freed. We are working to get freed versions of this firmware! Being the first manufacturer to care about freedom and privacy, we are making a lot of progress upstream."
I am skeptical they are going to get firmware for the hard drive. It would be easier to make your own SSD from nand flash chips and write your own firmware.
Also, they're no longer using the Nvidia chip. They say it's because they decided that VT-d was very important, and the i7-4770HQ needed for the VT-d required them to use the Intel GPU.
Honestly, I prefer the Intel GPU. I don't play a lot of 3D games, and the Iris Pro GPU is so much faster than many discrete GPUs I've used, and the Intel graphics driver team actually tries to cooperate with the open source community. Unlike the Intel network driver team.
The chip this uses , the i7-4770HQ , uses vt-d. According to invisible labs[1], vt-d can allow certain malware attacks. Afaik, even after being informed of this by invisible labs researchers, intel did nothing(afaik) to solve this.
I'm excited about a company that will ensure a good, compatible experience with linux on a laptop. I develop on mac osx and linux vms (vagrant). I want to move to linux but the linux desktop experience just isn't there yet.
These days, most of the games I play are readily available and work well on Linux. All of the Valve Source games have been ported, Civ V works great, many independent and upcoming titles on Steam have good Linux versions. Steam has been really good for Linux games.
I pretty much have no reason to reboot into Windows. I used to reboot for Netflix, but now it works in recent Chrome versions on Linux.
That said, I've used Linux as my primary desktop OS since 1995 (but always with a backup Windows partition), so I'm not the ideal person to look to for whether Linux is ready for the desktop...it's been ready for my desktop for a couple decades. But, I think now I'm at a point where I don't feel any need to have a Windows partition, for anything.
From my testing, the macbook air is one of the better laptops on the market now in terms of battery life and general feel (the touchpad is second to none in my opinion).
But even for a laptop this prevalent, getting it to work with Ubuntu is a pain, and you run into a bunch of little bugs consistently.
I understand that it's a major uphill battle, but over the many many laptops I've tried to use with Linux, I've not found one that offers a good experience when it comes to the things that are important to a laptop (like battery life, secondary display support, and the like).
I'm totally cool with using Linux on a desktop (though I don't own a desktop anymore), had some great experiences even when going full Arch.
I've been happily plugging away with Ubuntu on a Thinkpad T530 for a while now and an old Dell w/ an Intel Core 2 Duo for years before that. Both installs went smoothly.
The hassle involved in getting Ubuntu working on a MacBook is not representative of laptop installations in general. Macs are special beasts and looking at the relevant support wiki page there are all sorts of hoops that I just didn't have to jump through in either of my non-Mac installations. I'm sorry you had a poor experience!
I've had some Dell and HP laptops (and a super old thinkpad, but that one worked alright given it couldn't really do much), and have had extremely bad driver issues. The big one has been the graphics card, but also flaky wifi, and even sound card issues! Battery life was always an issue (I would have 4 hours on windows, only an hour and change on linux), but I think that was linked to graphics card issues.
Having issues with a sound card gives me flashback to windows 95.
Have you tried putting linux on a zenbook? Easily as good or better than mac hardware and I've put archlinux on there with zero issues on multiple models.
depends on the model, I'm sure. I've never had any problems with the battery life, but that's highly subjective to the way people use a laptop. I'm always spending a couple hours here and there at a coffee shop, but I carry my laptop in a messenger bag so having a charger nearby isn't a problem. Plug it in when I need to, don't bother if I don't.
I'm always curious why people talk about needing battery life so often. Only thing I can think of is if you fly overseas often you would need great battery life, but a mac wouldn't cover that use case either. Where are people going that they aren't within a few feet of an outlet when they are computing?
I'm in enough places without easy access to outlets. Even in a restaurant (like a Denny's or something) where I'll go without that many outlets.
At least the starbucks around my area don't have that many plugs either.
Another advantage of having such a long battery life is that I basically can go anywhere after work (where I do have a charger) and not worry about plugging it in at all until the next day. Also, not having to carry around my charger makes carrying around my laptop great.
It's definitely a priority thing, and also dependent on lifestyle. In college there were power outlets basically everywhere so I didn't have the issue, but ever since I've started working in various spots not having to look for the power outlet has been a net benefit.
If you needed to find an outlet, would you have to change anything other than where you were sitting? Maybe you're in a large city and all the outlets are taken at coffee shops? I mean I can even find outlets at fast food restaurants. I'm not in college, I work remotely, so I'm moving around as much as anyone out there. It's not uncommon for me to work from three locations in a day and it's highly uncommon for me to only work from one.
I've had excellent experiences running Arch on Thinkpads (I think this is the 3rd, maybe 4th Thinkpad I've run Arch on).
One time I looked into getting a macbook for the nice hardware and running Arch on it, and quickly nope'd out of there. That is not a project for the faint of heart.
I personally use LinuxCertified laptops, and I have no problems. No Microsoft Tax, no incompatible hardware, build quality as good as a Thinkpad (my old Gold Standard Laptop), and they even allow you to spec out a custom system with an updating price on the webpage (within reason, but there are quite a few tweakable parameters).
I don't think it ever will be. I first installed redhat linux back in 95, and it was a multi weekend project, and I had to solder something. Since then, the installation has gone from insane to Windows XP easy, but it seems stuck there. And even for a media server, I have to dip into the shell to get it working. If you still have to use the shell 20 years later for a non edge case, it isn't going to get better, there is something about the architecture that is preventing it.
And I don't want an office suite, or movie recorder, or any of that crap. But I want the Gnome Terminal, or other pretty terminal where I have font smoothing or whatever that is called. I know I can do this with Arch, but I'm not a systems guy, I'm a developer, and I don't want to have to learn about all the systems crap. I just want a shell that is pleasant to look at, my fatigue is so much less when looking at pleasant non offensive colours.
Unfortunately, the only way to get fairly nice looking fonts on Linux is to use a 4k display :-( Even with font hinting, the quality you are used to from OS X or even Windows isn't there, and most people that develop Linux don't seem to have developed sensitivity for font quality, so you should not expect any improvements. Any time I look at my Debian server, I have that strange unpleasant feeling of fonts being somehow off. Ubuntu/Mint are better, yet still nowhere near the clarity of OS X.
You can get font smoothing from xterm by using the -fa option. Use xfontsel to build the parameter string. There are probably "xresource" (iirc) settings to change its color palette, or you can use a 256color scheme for your editor. It's not exactly easy, but it is very fast and lightweight.
Interesting. My experience -- such it be -- is meticulously constructed to exactly how I need it. My current system has been the result of 18 months of a slow but steady process of phaselocking the desktop with how I work with it.
A truly philosophically pure laptop would, among other things, guarantee absolutely no involvement of slave labor/abusive practices in its supply chain. Everyone from the mines to the assembly plant to the retail store would have secure, middle-class employment. Revenue would not fund political corruption or violence related to labor, natural resources, or environmental impact.
But it would not contain binary blobs either, so this is a positive step. The branding is a little grandiose for the extent of its "philosophical purity," though.
There actually is at least one software license (the HESSLA) which has restrictions on use and redistribution regarding human rights: http://www.hacktivismo.com/about/hessla.php
It is considered non-free by the standards of the FSF, Debian and the OSI alike. As such, ironically enough it's your proposal that ends up being "philosophically impure".
That may be your philosophy. I care more about open computer systems than making everyone middle class (which doesn't even make sense; by the well-ordering principle, there will always be a lower class). I think that open computers are more important for the long-term improvement of the human race than the pursuit of presently unrealizable economic goals.
> I care more about open computer systems than making everyone middle class
The parent speaks about slave labour or something very close to it not about living in the suburbs.
> there will always be a lower class
That is your opinion and it may be true. Even so, the "lower class" could live without the worry of basic necessities. A lot of people do not currently have that luxury.
Well, it's not really an opinion though. Unless everybody had a perfectly equal standard of living (which sounds vaguely Harrison Bergeron-esque) there will always be a lower class, even if they have a rather high standard of living.
Other than that, I agree with everything you say in your comment.
I beg to differ. (I'm unaffiliated and haven't donated btw). The Purism project is not directly comparable. They are doing substantial extra work and hassle and working with different parts. It's not about whether the machine runs a fully-free OS (System 76 running Ubuntu isn't even fully-free as Ubuntu isn't fully-free). It's about even the basic hardware drivers, BIOS, firmware etc. all being free/libre and the extra cost is covering the hassle and specifics of making that happen in the real world today.
So what about this company? What is their reputation? I'm in the market for a Linux laptop with about those specs, but how can I easily compare this to a more established brand in terms of after sales support and overall build quality?
Last I heard, radio firmware pretty much had to be locked down or the regulators wouldn't certify you; the principle here being that as all modern radio chipsets are basically software-defined radios, they're indistinguishable from incredibly effective jammers. They consider the right to dial emergency services on a cell phone and have it work to be more important than the right to play with hardware.
So I'm interested to see that there's actual open source firmware for the ath9k, and it looks like the hardware will accept unsigned firmware images. Have the rules changed? Or are the regulators simply less concerned about wifi relative to mobile phone radios?
Long answer: http://youtu.be/WOcYTqoSQ68
Short answer, iirc the atheros will usually play within the rules, and the free drivers aren't super officially supported so what those crazy hackers do isn't so much their responsibility.
But that's based on half-remembering that talk, which I watched five months ago.
This looks pretty cool to me. I've been happy with the Ubuntu/Dell efforts over the years, but it's really, really good to see people working on nice Linux machines.
They talk about ensuring that open source works on the machine, anyone else concerned if they will try to inhibit close source software? Like this whole shitstorm around GCC?
I have a non-core boot X61s Lenovo that happens to have an ath5k wifi card built in (there are various different configurations of the X61s so don't assume they will all have an Atheros card) and I have not seen a Linux it could not run. OpenBSD works fine, so I assume that other BSDs would.
A little underpowered by today's standards, and tends to get warm if you are compiling a lot of stuff or other processor intensive applications, but fine for what I do most days.
Call me a skeptic, but there's nothing philosophically "pure" about a locked down hardware platform where discrete components are all dependent on each other and NOT user serviceable.
It would be nice if Lenovo provided the option of the classic Thinkpad keyboard. I'm considering going with a used Thinkpad as my next laptop for that reason.
Laptop choice seems to have become a monoculture of Apple clones. If Purism would provide that keyboard option I would find it hard to resist.
Fine, if you don't perceive value, then you are not part of the target market for this product/project. Enjoy your current choice of hardware and software.
Other people may see value where you do not however.
I'm typing this on a Georgian reproduction then :-)
Thinkpad X61s with 2.5Gb RAM and 100Gb hard drive. Runs Kubuntu 15.04 alpha very responsively (with baloo working) and allows me to complete office/planning type tasks.
From the Purism crowdfunding campaign: "The Librem 15 is the first high-end laptop where you are in control and have complete visibility into the kernel, the operating system, and all software."
It seems like the Novena came first and is substantially more free/open. A laptop running all open source software is still good, but it's not as pure as claimed.