Current, BLOB free laptop available Europe?

[Paul Menzel]

Dear coreboot folks,

I am looking for a new portable device available in Europe.

Is it true, that the Acer Chromebook R 13 [1], is the only current BLOB
free device? The device currently costs 400 €. Is MediaTek “a good
citizen”, that means, do they provide datasheets and work on drivers?

The Samsung Chromebook Plus/Pro with RK3399 [2] are only available in
the USA, right?

Thanks,

Paul

[1] https://www.acer.com/ac/en/US/content/series/acerchromebookr13
[2] https://chromeunboxed.com/samsung-chromebook-pros-processor-rk3399-gets-benc...

[PeerCorps Trust Fund]

Hi Paul,

Vikings in Germany has this: https://store.vikings.net/libre-friendly-hardware/x200-ryf-certfied

I suppose these don't necessarily count as "new" as in right from the factory floor, but depending on your use case it might be worth a look. It is FSF certified.

Mike

On 05/23/2017 09:54 AM, Paul Menzel wrote:
> Dear coreboot folks,
>
> I am looking for a new portable device available in Europe.
>
> Is it true, that the Acer Chromebook R 13 [1], is the only current BLOB
> free device? The device currently costs 400 €. Is MediaTek “a good
> citizen”, that means, do they provide datasheets and work on drivers?
>
> The Samsung Chromebook Plus/Pro with RK3399 [2] are only available in
> the USA, right?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Paul
>
> [1] https://www.acer.com/ac/en/US/content/series/acerchromebookr13
> [2] https://chromeunboxed.com/samsung-chromebook-pros-processor-rk3399-gets-benc...

[Martin A]

Hi Paul,

Did you have look here:

https://www.fsf.org/resources/hw/endorsement/respects-your-freedom

Martin

________________________________
De : coreboot  de la part de Paul Menzel 
Envoyé : mardi 23 mai 2017 08:54
À : [e-mail]
Objet : [coreboot] Current, BLOB free laptop available Europe?

Dear coreboot folks,

I am looking for a new portable device available in Europe.

Is it true, that the Acer Chromebook R 13 [1], is the only current BLOB
free device? The device currently costs 400 €. Is MediaTek “a good
citizen”, that means, do they provide datasheets and work on drivers?

The Samsung Chromebook Plus/Pro with RK3399 [2] are only available in
the USA, right?

Thanks,

Paul

[1] https://www.acer.com/ac/en/US/content/series/acerchromebookr13
Acer Chromebook R 13 | Laptops - One Chromebook, many ...https://www.acer.com/ac/en/US/content/series/acerchromebookr13
www.acer.com
Acer Laptops Acer Chromebook R 13: One Chromebook, many options. Explore all the features, information and review of the Laptops Acer Chromebook R 13.

[2] https://chromeunboxed.com/samsung-chromebook-pros-processor-rk3399-gets-benc...
Samsung Chromebook Pro's Processor (RK3399) Gets ...https://chromeunboxed.com/samsung-chromebook-pros-processor-rk3399-gets-benchmarked-and-it-is-fast/
chromeunboxed.com
Full disclosure, this is not the Samsung Chromebook Pro getting benchmarked, though as you’ll see shortly, we can do a bit of math and get a pretty good idea of ...

[Tiberiu]

Hi,

On 23.05.2017 11:39, PeerCorps Trust Fund wrote:
> Vikings in Germany has this:
> https://store.vikings.net/libre-friendly-hardware/x200-ryf-certfied
>
> I suppose these don't necessarily count as "new" as in right from the
> factory floor, but depending on your use case it might be worth a look.
> It is FSF certified.

Like our friends Vikings, Technoethical is also based in Europe
(Romania) and ships worldwide.

Our shop has the largest catalog of laptops with fully free BIOS. We've
been selling laptops with fully free BIOS for almost one year now.

https://libreboot.org/suppliers.html#technoethical
https://technoethical.com/laptops

We also offer an installation service of libreboot (fully free coreboot
distro). Upon request, we can install libreboot also on other laptops
besides those listed on our website.

Thank GNU,
--
Tiberiu
Technoethical

[Peter Stuge]

Hi Tiberiu,

Tiberiu wrote:
> We also offer an installation service of libreboot (fully free coreboot
> distro). Upon request, we can install libreboot also on other laptops

I'd like to encourage you (all vendors, really) to both emphasize and
engage with coreboot directly.

I know that I would really like for coreboot proper to be immediately
usable for you.

//Peter

[Tiberiu]

Hi,

On 23.05.2017 15:27, Peter Stuge wrote:
> Tiberiu wrote:
> > We also offer an installation service of libreboot (fully free coreboot
> > distro). Upon request, we can install libreboot also on other laptops
>
> I'd like to encourage you (all vendors, really) to both emphasize and
> engage with coreboot directly.

We'd like to engage with coreboot too, and the conference in Denver
seems like a good opportunity, since one of our team members lives two
states away, but he lacks the funds to pay the $150 ticket to attend.

We do have the largest catalog of laptops with fully free BIOS, but this
is a consequence of the facts that we don't have a big capital to build
a large stock like other vendors do, we don't have as many orders and we
are, as someone from the FSF staff said, "hard workers", so we don't
mind the extra work to solder wires for flashing the X00 Tablet. :-)
> I know that I would really like for coreboot proper to be immediately
> usable for you.

Does coreboot ship without nonfree blobs for the laptops we sell?
https://technoethical.com/laptops

Thanks,
Tiberiu
--
Technoethical

[Paul Menzel]

Dear Mike,

Am Dienstag, den 23.05.2017, 11:39 +0300 schrieb PeerCorps Trust Fund:
> Vikings in Germany has this: https://store.vikings.net/libre-friendly
> -hardware/x200-ryf-certfied
>
> I suppose these don't necessarily count as "new" as in right from the
> factory floor, but depending on your use case it might be worth a
> look. It is FSF certified.

Thank you for your reply, although I already new about that. For
laptops I don’t want to buy Intel x86 devices for two reasons.

1. The firmware of the embedded controller is still a proprietary.
   2. As Lenovo and Intel did not help in any way to get coreboot going on
      these devices, and don’t want to support them, by increasing the
      demand and therefore value of these devices. I rather want to 
      support vendors shipping coreboot directly. So it looks like
      ARM/MIPS devices are the only choice right now.

Thanks,

Paul

What do each of the letters B...? , L...? , O...? , B...? represent in the acronym BLOB ?

[Don Saklad]

What do each of the letters B...? , L...? , O...? , B...? represent in
the acronym BLOB ?

Paul Menzel  writes:
> [1:multipart/signed Hide]
> [1/1:text/plain Hide]
> Dear coreboot folks,
> I am looking for a new portable device available in Europe.
> Is it true, that the Acer Chromebook R 13 [1], is the only current BLOB
> free device? The device currently costs 400 €. Is MediaTek “a good
> citizen”, that means, do they provide datasheets and work on drivers?
> The Samsung Chromebook Plus/Pro with RK3399 [2] are only available in
> the USA, right?
> Thanks,
> Paul
> [1] https://www.acer.com/ac/en/US/content/series/acerchromebookr13
> [2] https://chromeunboxed.com/samsung-chromebook-pros-processor-rk3399-gets-benc...
> [1/2:application/pgp-signature Show Save:signature.asc (195B)]
> [2:text/plain Hide]

[Paul Kocialkowski]

Hi,

Le mardi 23 mai 2017 à 08:54 +0200, Paul Menzel a écrit :
> I am looking for a new portable device available in Europe.
>
> Is it true, that the Acer Chromebook R 13 [1], is the only current BLOB
> free device? The device currently costs 400 €. Is MediaTek “a good
> citizen”, that means, do they provide datasheets and work on drivers?

The Chromebook R13 (elm) is very close to being able to boot without non-free
blobs. The only remaining blobs are the MT8173 PCM firmwares[0] in ARM Trusted
Firmware. I am working hard to liberate them and I'm very confident that it will
happen pretty soon.

However, note that the kernel will require blobs for features such as:
* hardware video decoding
* Wi-Fi and bluetooth
* GPU support

I'm also not sure about the status of the PD (USB type-C controller) chip. It
might also be running a proprietary firmware (maybe someone from the CrOS team
can clarify this).

Also, note that as usual with laptops, there are lots of other non-free
components around that are preinstalled on the device, such as the webcam
firmware.

Note that ARMv7 CrOS devices (mainly RK3288 and Tegra K1) can also boot blobless
and generally require less kernel blobs too. They also have much better upstream
Linux support than the ARMv8 ones (which are more recent). For instance, I'm
running a mainline kernel on the Tegra K1 nyans, which is quite usable despite
some issues that I have left to fix. There's also a very high chance that the
GPU will work with nouveau and free firmwares eventually (I'll be working with
nouveau developers to try and make this happen).
> The Samsung Chromebook Plus/Pro with RK3399 [2] are only available in
> the USA, right?

I am not aware of it being available in Europe. However, if you're fine with a 
qwerty layout, they work just as well in Europe ;)

RK3399 can currently already boot blobless but also requires kernel blobs.
However, it seems that the boot is currently broken with coreboot master and ToT
depthcharge and vboot (I'll be investigating this soon).

Also, the Chromebook Plus (kevin) does have a free software PD firmware.

Finally, note that the Chromebook Pro is an Intel x86 device, so probably not
very interesting given what you're looking for.

Cheers,

[0]: https://github.com/ARM-software/arm-trusted-firmware/blob/master/plat/mediat...

What do each of the letters B...? , L...? , O...? , B...? represent in the acronym BLOB ?

[Paul Kocialkowski]

Le mercredi 31 mai 2017 à 03:57 -0400, Don Saklad a écrit :
> What do each of the letters B...? , L...? , O...? , B...? represent in
> the acronym BLOB ?

See https://www.openbsd.org/lyrics.html#39 ;)

Cheers,
> Paul Menzel  writes:
> > [1:multipart/signed Hide]
> > [1/1:text/plain Hide]
> > Dear coreboot folks,
> > I am looking for a new portable device available in Europe.
> > Is it true, that the Acer Chromebook R 13 [1], is the only current BLOB
> > free device? The device currently costs 400 €. Is MediaTek “a good
> > citizen”, that means, do they provide datasheets and work on drivers?
> > The Samsung Chromebook Plus/Pro with RK3399 [2] are only available in
> > the USA, right?
> > Thanks,
> > Paul
> > [1] https://www.acer.com/ac/en/US/content/series/acerchromebookr13
> > [2] https://chromeunboxed.com/samsung-chromebook-pros-processor-rk3399-get
>
> s-benchmarked-and-it-is-fast/
> > [1/2:application/pgp-signature Show Save:signature.asc (195B)]
> > [2:text/plain Hide]

What do each of the letters B...? , L...? , O...? , B...? represent in the acronym BLOB ?

[Iru Cai]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_blob

The term *blob https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_large_object* was
first used in database management systems
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_management_system to describe a
collection of binary data https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_data
stored as a single entity.

On Wed, May 31, 2017 at 3:57 PM, Don Saklad  wrote:
> What do each of the letters B...? , L...? , O...? , B...? represent in
> the acronym BLOB ?
>
> Paul Menzel  writes:
> > [1:multipart/signed Hide]
> > [1/1:text/plain Hide]
> > Dear coreboot folks,
> > I am looking for a new portable device available in Europe.
> > Is it true, that the Acer Chromebook R 13 [1], is the only current BLOB
> > free device? The device currently costs 400 €. Is MediaTek “a good
> > citizen”, that means, do they provide datasheets and work on drivers?
> > The Samsung Chromebook Plus/Pro with RK3399 [2] are only available in
> > the USA, right?
> > Thanks,
> > Paul
> > [1] https://www.acer.com/ac/en/US/content/series/acerchromebookr13
> > [2] https://chromeunboxed.com/samsung-chromebook-pros-
>
> processor-rk3399-gets-benchmarked-and-it-is-fast/
> > [1/2:application/pgp-signature Show Save:signature.asc (195B)]
> > [2:text/plain Hide]

What do each of the letters B...? , L...? , O...? , B...? represent in the acronym BLOB ?

[Alberto Bursi]

Binary large Object, but it seems like a backronym (someone tried to 
create an acronym with a word used already)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_large_object

On 31/05/2017 09:57, Don Saklad wrote:
> What do each of the letters B...? , L...? , O...? , B...? represent in
> the acronym BLOB ?
>
> Paul Menzel  writes:
> > [1:multipart/signed Hide]
> > [1/1:text/plain Hide]
> > Dear coreboot folks,
> > I am looking for a new portable device available in Europe.
> > Is it true, that the Acer Chromebook R 13 [1], is the only current BLOB
> > free device? The device currently costs 400 €. Is MediaTek “a good
> > citizen”, that means, do they provide datasheets and work on drivers?
> > The Samsung Chromebook Plus/Pro with RK3399 [2] are only available in
> > the USA, right?
> > Thanks,
> > Paul
> > [1] https://www.acer.com/ac/en/US/content/series/acerchromebookr13
> > [2] https://chromeunboxed.com/samsung-chromebook-pros-processor-rk3399-gets-benc...
> > [1/2:application/pgp-signature Show Save:signature.asc (195B)]
> > [2:text/plain Hide]

What do each of the letters B...? , L...? , O...? , B...? represent in the acronym BLOB ?

[Zoran Stojsavljevic]

*BLOB*: *B*inary *L*arge *OB*ject.

Zoran

On Wed, May 31, 2017 at 9:57 AM, Don Saklad  wrote:
> What do each of the letters B...? , L...? , O...? , B...? represent in
> the acronym BLOB ?
>
> Paul Menzel  writes:
> > [1:multipart/signed Hide]
> > [1/1:text/plain Hide]
> > Dear coreboot folks,
> > I am looking for a new portable device available in Europe.
> > Is it true, that the Acer Chromebook R 13 [1], is the only current BLOB
> > free device? The device currently costs 400 €. Is MediaTek “a good
> > citizen”, that means, do they provide datasheets and work on drivers?
> > The Samsung Chromebook Plus/Pro with RK3399 [2] are only available in
> > the USA, right?
> > Thanks,
> > Paul
> > [1] https://www.acer.com/ac/en/US/content/series/acerchromebookr13
> > [2] https://chromeunboxed.com/samsung-chromebook-pros-
>
> processor-rk3399-gets-benchmarked-and-it-is-fast/
> > [1/2:application/pgp-signature Show Save:signature.asc (195B)]
> > [2:text/plain Hide]

[Mike Banon]

actually Lenovo G505S has more freedom in some relations, if compared
to Chromebook R13 : for example, G505S does not require blobs for WiFi
and Bluetooth if you replace its' preinstalled Broadcom half size mini
PCI-e card with Atheros AR9462 (which has 2.4 GHz + 5 GHz + Bluetooth
and is top-of-the-line ath9k card) and its' price is just $8-$10 with
free shipping included ;) also there are some great technical
opportunities which chromebooks do not have - e.g. you could replace
WiFi mini pci-e card with double SATA ports RAID card, or you can
install 16 GB of RAM because G505S RAM is not soldered ! Still could
get G505S in good condition at many USA / European markets, e.g.
yesterday at eBay I saw G505S based at USA which costs just $95, also
UK-based in nearly mint condition ;) Also there are a lot of spare
parts available, which helps to ensure the long lifetime of this great
performance quad core laptop ( Chromebook is not even close at
performance, as far as I know )

Best regards,
Mike Banon

On Wed, May 31, 2017 at 11:03 AM, Paul Kocialkowski  wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Le mardi 23 mai 2017 à 08:54 +0200, Paul Menzel a écrit :
> > I am looking for a new portable device available in Europe.
> >
> > Is it true, that the Acer Chromebook R 13 [1], is the only current BLOB
> > free device? The device currently costs 400 €. Is MediaTek “a good
> > citizen”, that means, do they provide datasheets and work on drivers?
>
> The Chromebook R13 (elm) is very close to being able to boot without non-free
> blobs. The only remaining blobs are the MT8173 PCM firmwares[0] in ARM Trusted
> Firmware. I am working hard to liberate them and I'm very confident that it will
> happen pretty soon.
>
> However, note that the kernel will require blobs for features such as:
> hardware video decoding
> Wi-Fi and bluetooth
> GPU support
>
> I'm also not sure about the status of the PD (USB type-C controller) chip. It
> might also be running a proprietary firmware (maybe someone from the CrOS team
> can clarify this).
>
> Also, note that as usual with laptops, there are lots of other non-free
> components around that are preinstalled on the device, such as the webcam
> firmware.
>
> Note that ARMv7 CrOS devices (mainly RK3288 and Tegra K1) can also boot blobless
> and generally require less kernel blobs too. They also have much better upstream
> Linux support than the ARMv8 ones (which are more recent). For instance, I'm
> running a mainline kernel on the Tegra K1 nyans, which is quite usable despite
> some issues that I have left to fix. There's also a very high chance that the
> GPU will work with nouveau and free firmwares eventually (I'll be working with
> nouveau developers to try and make this happen).
> > The Samsung Chromebook Plus/Pro with RK3399 [2] are only available in
> > the USA, right?
>
> I am not aware of it being available in Europe. However, if you're fine with a
> qwerty layout, they work just as well in Europe ;)
>
> RK3399 can currently already boot blobless but also requires kernel blobs.
> However, it seems that the boot is currently broken with coreboot master and ToT
> depthcharge and vboot (I'll be investigating this soon).
>
> Also, the Chromebook Plus (kevin) does have a free software PD firmware.
>
> Finally, note that the Chromebook Pro is an Intel x86 device, so probably not
> very interesting given what you're looking for.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Website: https://www.paulk.fr/
> Coding blog: https://code.paulk.fr/
> Git repositories: https://git.paulk.fr/ https://git.code.paulk.fr/
> --
> coreboot mailing list: [e-mail]
> https://mail.coreboot.org/mailman/listinfo/coreboot