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The Free Software Foundation (FSF) has awarded its Respects Your Freedom (RYF) certification to the Taurinus X200 laptop sold by Libiquity.
This is the first product of Libiquity to achieve RYF certification. The Taurinus X200 has the same architecture and certified software as the Libreboot X200, which was certified in January 2015. The Taurinus X200 can be purchased from Libiquity at https://shop.libiquity.com/product/taurinus-x200.
The Taurinus X200 is a refurbished and updated laptop based on the Lenovo ThinkPad X200, with all of the original low-level firmware and operating system software replaced. It runs the FSF-endorsed Trisquel GNU/Linux operating system and the free software boot system, Libreboot. Perhaps most importantly, all of Intel's Management Engine (ME) firmware and software has been removed from this laptop.
The RYF certification mark means that the product meets the FSF's standards in regard to users' freedom, control over the product, and privacy. The Taurinus X200 comes with the fast and secure Libreboot firmware and the FSF-endorsed Trisquel GNU/Linux operating system. Importantly, Intel's Management Engine (ME) firmware with its applications like AMT (remote out-of-band management/backdoor system, part of "vPro") and PAVP (audio/video DRM) have been removed from this laptop.
The laptop ships within the USA and may be purchased from the Libiquity Store.
(Score: 0, Troll) by Hairyfeet on Wednesday September 30 2015, @11:40PM
Sorry but it has worse specs than the junker lappys I sell for $100 at the shop. I mean a C2D? In 2015? 2GB of RAM? 160Gb HDD? You can get better specs on CL for under $120 any day of the week and they are wanting $450 which is more than a brand new AMD quad which will curbstomp this thing!
THIS, this right here, is the problem FOSS hardware has had for a looooooonnnnnggggg time. In every.single.case. the ONLY THING they have to offer is THEIR definition of "freedom"and that is it. Better specs than the competition? Nope. Better prices? Oh fuck no, not even close. Better support, better retail presence, better service after the sale? Nope nope and nuh uh.
I'm sorry but you just can't run a business this way and not expect to fail, you just can't, just ask the OpenMoko guys, the guys with the open GPU, the Jolla, I can literally wallpaper this page with failures because your definition of freedom is not enough to make a successful business.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 01 2015, @12:05AM
People pay upwards of $30k to drive old as fuck cars in their original restored condition.
This is about 1% of that cost, for a fully restored laptop, that cost 3 times as much brand new six years ago. It has strong aftermarket support, a very informative community at forum.thinkpads.com, and is more durable than any of the trash that you sell. Some people, like those vintage car owners, will pay for this.
The rest of you can spend easily as much money on gimmicks to protect your "security", like Kaspersky and Windows 10.
(Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Thursday October 01 2015, @11:13AM
Except restored classic cars are worth several times their original value while this thing is worth exactly 75 bucks [ebay.com] and all the downmods? Not gonna change that. BTW all me to LMAO, they must be making a fucking killing on these per unit, I bet if I were to buy 'em in bulk from a refurb they probably go for less than $50 a piece...say what you want about "Apple Tax" and "Windows Tax" but you don't see either of them making $400 a unit in profit on a bottom of the line system!
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 01 2015, @01:49PM
A restored classic car is worth whatever the cost of parts + labor is.
A better example: take one of those $75 ebay X200's, replace the palmrest/keyboard plastics with new ones, replace the heatsink with a new one (since the original fans were prone to dying) and then use Middleton's BIOS or something similar to get rid of the BIOS whitelist so you can put in a newer Atheros wifi card. You're now at $250, plus time for labor. That was closer to $500 in the summer of 2013 when I did exactly that.
Continuing the car example: Only the unscathed (undriven) low-mileage matching numbers cars are worth several times their original value. And even then, a horrible investment compared to putting that same money in an index fund and letting it sit all those years.
Libre laptops don't have economies of scale to drive the costs down. They provide total ownership of the software stack, which is a value to some people. The rest of us can block TCP port 16992 at the external firewall (hopefully not powered by an Intel chip) to keep the Intel Management Engine from talking to whomever it talks to.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 01 2015, @03:32PM
Never heard of paying for convenience? Lots of people do not know how to setup a laptop that fully respects your freedom, or do not have the time. This is nice for them.
You probably get downmodded because you make inflammatory comments about basically anything related to Free Software, even going so far as to mock those that try to help others obtain freedom. Also, most of your comments mention secondary issues like price or quality, which is not the point of Free Software.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by skater on Thursday October 01 2015, @11:26AM
People pay upwards of $30k to drive old as fuck cars in their original restored condition.
Generally, not as a daily driver. They use them for occasional cruising, car shows, etc. The owners almost always have another car that's good for driving on a daily basis. The equivalent for us would be keeping a PCjr around for the nostalgia or so you can play River Raid off the cartridge now and then - you wouldn't fire it up to browse Solyent and other news sites.
(Score: 2) by dyingtolive on Thursday October 01 2015, @12:47AM
To be fair, if there ever was an ancient laptop worth doing this to, it'd be one of the Thinkpad line. I came into a spare Thinkpad R50 (Pentium M of all the things) some, probably, eight years ago, that I gave to my sister to use at college. She installed Ubuntu on it and has been using it ever since. Only hardware problem she ran into was when she had to edit a bios image to disable the damned wlan whitelist (the one bad thing about ANY of the IBM/Lenovo line), and she had to replace the coin cell because she was getting sick of the RTC resets.
I actually now have a spare G500 I should really send her as an upgrade, now that I think about it.
Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!
(Score: 1) by pehjota on Thursday October 01 2015, @02:35AM
Yeah, that's a problem with IBM/Lenovo, HP, Dell, and others. You may be pleased to know that this Taurinus laptop comes with no such whitelist. In fact an Atheros Wi-Fi card comes installed, which was not "authorized" by Lenovo's BIOS.
(Score: 2) by dyingtolive on Thursday October 01 2015, @05:29AM
Such a pity it's so old though. I've already 'fixed' the G500. Had to for linux/hackintosh compatibility issues.
The bios fix was one of the few times she's called me for tech support though. Didn't really need to do much other than provide moral support. For an art grad, she probably got the real brains in the family, all things considered.
Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!
(Score: 2) by Zz9zZ on Thursday October 01 2015, @01:00AM
I empathize with your statement, the cost is quite high for the specs. However, it is not easy to break into a market that is notoriously closed and anti user freedom while offering any kind of competitive pricing. No way a small group focused on open systems can compete at the modern level, they have to work with vendors that will help them or old enough hardware that they can reverse engineer / modify. Also, upgrading the ram and hard drive is actually not that expensive, though more than the components themselves. I'm sure they are banking on selling a few more of the nicer rigs in order to keep the lower specc machine more affordable.
The last time I heard about an open laptop it was WAY more expensive, this falls under the possibility of "new toy" purchase :)
~Tilting at windmills~
(Score: 1, Troll) by Hairyfeet on Thursday October 01 2015, @02:00AM
They can stick their fingers in their ears and mode me troll all they want, can they name JUST ONE consumer device that had only their definition of freedom to separate them for the competition that DID NOT FAIL HORRIBLY? Because I can sure name plenty of corpses, OpenGPU, OpenMoko, OpenPandora, Jolla, I can keep this up all day because if all you have is your definition of "freedom" which can be ANYTHING, be it the GPL V2 version, V3 version, BSD version, AGPL, Public domain, etc etc etc, then your project will fail because you have NOTHING that more than a handful will care about.
Lets see how many here are putting their money where their mouths are, if I'm wrong? Then lets see screencaps of your orders because I bet NOT ONE of those singing the praises of the GPL here are gonna buy one of these, not one. Just as they sang the praises of all of the above but when rubber met the road and they saw what they got for their money they would have a heaping cup of STFU and not spent a single cent. So don't hate me because the cheapskates are all talk and no action, if this thing sells even 1000 pieces it will be a miracle, I personally bet they won't even hit $250, because you can bitch and whine and mod down all you want but you ain't gonna shell out $450 for a 2007 era laptop are you? I rest my case, self righteous hypocrites that are all talk but no walk.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 1) by Francis on Thursday October 01 2015, @02:14AM
OpenPandora would have done OK if they hadn't chosen a shithole of a CC. I have one and it's quite nice and if the CC hadn't destroyed several hundred thousand dollars worth of boards by leaving them sit around without being properly taken care of, it would have come in at a relatively reasonable price.
There was a market for it and hopefully the Pyra will do better. But, in general, I agree with you, freedom of this sort isn't particularly marketable.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 01 2015, @02:26AM
I bought one several months ago. I find it liberating to run a system which is free from the BIOS up. Those Libreboot fellows are doing wonderful work that I value because I believe privacy, security, and freedom are important. Francis himself blessed my x200.
https://w6.io/r/myx200.jpg [w6.io]
(Score: 1, Troll) by Hairyfeet on Thursday October 01 2015, @06:37AM
Thank, thank you ever so much for PROVING my point! ONE GUY, one, out of a site that is...what? Now over 4000+ users? Exactly ONE was sold. Notice that I did NOT say that none would be sold, but made it quite clear that never would they sell enough to be viable which again just proves my point. After all if you look hard enough you can find an OpenMoko, Openpandora, Jolla tablet, etc but they never sold enough to keep the doors open so unless this is literally being run as a non profit charity case? Yeah its doomed.
BTW note it was an AC account, I have zero doubt when I put that out there a couple of FOSSies put out the call on the Tux forums for the one guy that had one and if he/she wouldn't have posted AC? We'd see that person had exactly ONE POST and it was that one...how about it admins? Care to tell us how many posts have come from that one IP address? I don't want to know the address, just if they ever posted here before this time...I'm guessing that is a big NO.
This is of course ignoring the rotting elephant in the room which is that laptops have a life span and the plastics and boards used in those? Yeah this ain't no Toughbook, and you have no idea how close this thing is to being dead when you get it. I'd point out how limited a run that particular Lenovo was but...lets be fucking honest, they'll never reach even mid 4 digit sales and will probably end up with a pile of the things unsold, so like OpenMoko it won't matter how limited the supply is. But of course feel free to scream at me for daring to point out your emperor is bare assed, meanwhile I will have a good ROFLCopter when this thing goes the way of Jolla, OpenMoko, OpenPandora...BTW did anybody come up with ONE open hardware of the last decade that wasn't a complete flop? Yeah thought so, I rest my case.
BTW the truly fucking sad part? Is I WANT something like this to make it big, after all we are rapidly approaching a time when X86 will be as locked as cellphones, but because the assholes that run places like the FSF are so fucking militant they make SJWs look like peaceniks they will cock it up just like they did with this. How much you wanna bet they could have used a laptop from 2014/2015 by just contacting somebody like Acer or Asus and asking them which units have AMD (so no Intel spychip) and support coreboot? But nope, got to be so anal retentive that they can't just say "If you want 100% free use this USB wireless instead of the built in one which we have off by default"...nope, got to be so fucking hardcore about it they could only find a unit that has been out of sale longer than Obama has been in office, I'm shocked they didn't follow St. iGNUcious and use an uber rare Loongsoon cheapo Chinabook! Nadella and Cook really ought to send them a fruitbasket, as stupid ass moves like charging $450 for a unit as old as dirt REALLY makes their jobs easier. After all what is Joe Public that hears about the Win 10 spying gonna do, buy this ancient POS or download the "disable spy" tool and get a much nicer and newer system for less? Hell at least if they went with the POS Chinabook they could have offered it for sub $150, at $445? Well there is retarded and there is playing Russian roulette with 5 bullets dumb, this? The latter.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 01 2015, @07:15AM
Wow. You clearly have some inner issues that you are having a hard time dealing with and have projected them on this project. So much anger and screaming, so little relevancy.
(Score: 2) by kurenai.tsubasa on Thursday October 01 2015, @01:29PM
Worse than SJWs?!
Wow.
If I didn't need a snowblower, I think I'd buy one of these laptops today just to piss you off. (Too bad they're on back order!) Seriously, why is free software such a trigger for you? I know you disapprove of Windows 10, but that's the future, my friend. Before you know it, you'll turn on your computer one day and find a helpful message from the SJWs: “Your computer access has been suspended in pursuance of the Anti-Microaggression Act of 2112. Have a nice day.”
You'll get out your trusty Windows XP install disk, but UEFI 19 won't run it because it hasn't been signed by the Priests of the Temples of Syrinx.
(Score: 2) by skater on Thursday October 01 2015, @11:34AM
You got moderated troll, but I think you're exactly right. (Currently you're at (Score:3, Troll), after I modded you Insightful - which is kind of funny.)
I'll soon be in the market for a new laptop, and I've decided I'm going with a Linux laptop next time. So I looked, but I'm underwhelmed by the specs and overwhelmed by the price. The Macbook Pro I'm looking to replace has better specifications than this laptop. It's not a bad idea, but...
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Thursday October 01 2015, @02:51PM
Last time I looked Jolla [jolla.com] was still alive.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 01 2015, @06:15PM
Jolla is dead. They are DOA with their tablet product, Marc Dillon quit the company, and their marketing team walked out.
The new management is all about appeasing the Russian government (who chose Sailfish as their official mobile OS), and doesn't care about the original goals of Jolla as an open end-user device.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Thursday October 01 2015, @09:06PM
I see. Thank you for the details.
(Score: 2, Informative) by drgibbon on Thursday October 01 2015, @02:19AM
They are using these old machines because they're the ones they have been able to strip the Intel ME out of. Post-2008 CPUs look very difficult to achieve that on. Minifree [soylentnews.org] sell an X200 with a dock (which can link up with a good sized monitor) and also a T400 with stronger specs. I have an X200 from Minifree with 8GB RAM and an SSD and it's totally fine. Of course you can get better specs, but you also have to accept that cannot know what your machine is doing at a level beneath the operating system.
I don't think these guys are looking for big money, they are probably just passionate about libre computing because they are aware of its importance. Guys like Purism are taking a heavier business angle, and they sell "better" machines but they haven't solved the ME problem (which is a big deal). It's a bit sad that these X200s/T400s are the only option at present for libre computing (with the exception of the SSD firmware), but that's the way it is right now.
Certified Soylent Fresh!
(Score: 2) by melikamp on Thursday October 01 2015, @02:46AM
You've bought propaganda. This is not a problem with free computing: it's cheaper and more accessible than EVER before. The problem you are alluding to is the problem with NONFREE software, and can be summarized thusly: all major hardware & software vendors colluded to make it nearly impossible to buy a working mobile computer without a backdoor. And so at the moment, the cheapest way to make a free and secure laptop is by re-soldering a commercial offering. So in your mind, you are OK with selling a backdoor access to your personal computer to UNKNOWN parties for $300... That's great, I hope you get every bit of this value :)
(Score: 4, Informative) by pehjota on Thursday October 01 2015, @04:05AM
A similar company in the UK called Minifree [minifree.org] has been running profitably for a couple of years now. From what I've seen, they offer great support and service after the sale. Technical support, warranty (and after warranty) service, etc. Both of these companies do support by e-mail or even IRC (for people who want something a little more real-time).
Most businesses fail, for one reason or another. Not always just because you think there isn't a market for their products. (And in this case, there seems to be a market for computers that can be trusted by their owners to not expose their data to attackers through a firmware backdoor, send all their desktop search queries to Bing/Superfish/Amazon, etc.)
(Score: 2) by Nollij on Thursday October 01 2015, @11:35PM
The strange part to me is the fact that RAM/HDD for that model are EXTREMELY upgradeable - Official specs say it can do 4GB, and there are reports of people getting 8GB to work.
Also, there's a good chance these drives weren't free (many organizations destroy all HDDs before sending the PC off to a refurbisher), so it's even stranger they didn't drop in a 128GB SSD.
Current RETAIL price on RAM for this is under $15/2GB stick, and less than $50 for an SSD. Certainly recoverable by the $300 profit margin.