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posted by on Wednesday January 18 2017, @04:33PM   Printer-friendly
from the not-free-as-in-beer dept.

It doesn't look like the Talos Secure Workstation will see the light of day with it's crowdfunding campaign ending this week and it's coming up more than three million dollars short of its financing goal. [Editor note: It did not meet the funding goal.] Now there's another effort to offer a libre system but using off-the-shelf x86 hardware.

[...] Libreboot developer Leah Rowe is now launching a libre system out of the ashes of the Talos Secure Workstation. She wrote in an email to Phoronix, "It's a high-end desktop/server platform, available in either configuration. It also supports virtualization and PCI passthrough, unlike older systems, so Qubes would be compatible...TALOS looks set to fail. Crowd Supply has removed it from their homepage, and Raptor Engineering is writing up an announcement that TALOS is shutting down - they are going to link to Minifree and tell people to purchase Libreboot D16 from me."

But before getting too excited, this isn't a new platform but rather an existing AMD server motherboard that simply comes pre-loaded with Libreboot to free the firmware/BIOS and then loaded with Debian GNU/Linux. The desktop and server versions make use of an AMD Opteron 6272, a.k.a. the older 32nm "Interlagos" CPUs derived from Bulldozer and released back in 2011.

-- submitted from IRC


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  • (Score: 2) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Wednesday January 18 2017, @08:39PM

    by Scruffy Beard 2 (6030) on Wednesday January 18 2017, @08:39PM (#455679)

    They are going for the "Respects your Freedom" certification. To do that, they are disabling the GPU on the Free versions.
    deep in message thread [gnu.org]

    ..or possibly not:

    There is a free reverse engineered driver for the Mali 200 and the Mali 400 GPU, which makes it possible to play Quake 3 Arena on the A20 SOC.

    Crowdfunding could be used to improve the driver.

    Lima Driver [limadriver.org]

    Development looks stalled at the moment.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 18 2017, @08:52PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 18 2017, @08:52PM (#455682)

    Sigh