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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: 2) by TheRaven on Thursday October 01 2015, @09:19AM
I'd agree with the low spec CPU - it is the same as the one that the laptop I had two upgrade cycles ago had. Both upgrades were noticeable speed improvements (though I do a lot of dev work on this machine, and fast builds make a huge difference in productivity. With 16GB of RAM and a decent SSD, I can keep a quad-core [8 thread] i7 saturated quite happily). The old Intel graphics are also fairly anaemic, though they should be fine for running a compositing desktop. The default config comes with a spinning rust disk (I was very happy not to have one of those in my last three laptops - a portable is really not a mechanical-disk friendly environment). The largest SSD they ship is 240GB which is pretty small by modern standards (my current laptop has 1TB, and is over a year old now). The max RAM is only 8GB, which might be just about enough now, but isn't particularly future proof.
The one thing that I disagree on is the VGA port. Most projectors still have VGA (HDMI is just starting to appear, but most organisations upgrade their projectors on a very long cycle) and so not having to carry a dongle around to be able to give presentations is a nice feature. I'd still want something more modern (ideally DisplayPort) for driving a monitor, though I don't think the GPU could actually handle a 4K monitor, even with the correct port.
sudo mod me up