Taurinus X200 laptop now FSF-certified to respect your freedom | Hacker News Reader

Taurinus X200 laptop now FSF-certified to respect your freedom

shop.libiquity.com

62 pointsIceyEC41 comments

Yea, this is just a Lenovo X200 w/ libreboot. The same old laptop that's been around for years and years, now with a crappy sticker over the windows key!

http://libreboot.org/docs/hcl/x200.html

You forgot the ridiculous price tag for a refurb X200. My stacked X201 8Gb of RAM, 256Gb Samsung 840 pro, new 9-cell, ultrabase with DVDRW, keyboard, mouse, 22" TFT cost about the price of their bottom end model in total (via ebay)

I assume it hasn't got a hard disk in it as well as they are technically standalone computers with closed source firmware as well these days.

Freedom is expensive.

> Freedom is expensive.

I'm willing to pay that price for owning something that I know cannot spy on me, does not have remote kill switches I can't control, and is completely serviceable from bottom to top by any third party.

It really is sad that these requirements are now expensive. They used to be taken for granted.

But if there's one thing we learnt the last few years, it's that we were never able to take those things for granted in the first place. You were never free of threat of spyware or kill switches. If anything, we have gotten much better at security than ever before.

Security from whom? Malware has always been fairly easy to avoid as a consumer. Built-in backdoors? What do you do about that?

Intel ME is relatively new, but it is also probably worth noting that it does not phone home until software asks it to be activated.

http://libreboot.org/docs/hcl/gm45_remove_me.html

Worth nothing that the ME could be disabled/removed on the GM45; perhaps there are undocumented ways to do this on the newer chipsets too, although Intel would probably consider that a "security vulnerability"...

The ability to disable ME on GM45 was known for years. It's just that these guys didn't believe it and fought extra hard to rediscover it.

All options to disable ME (there are a few) on newer devices are totally impractical, if for nothing else, because it disables certain power management capabilities.

If you like to fry eggs on your laptop, that may be the way to go though.

Notebook designed and manufactured by Wistron Corporation, assembled by Lenovo Group Ltd., and modified by Libiquity LLC. Product contains a combination of new and refurbished parts.

So it's a rebadged Thinkpad?

Yes, also potentially a lawsuit waiting to happen, not sure whats the legal status when you take something refurb it and then rebrand it.

Nah, it's fine, just not normally a viable business model.

Are you sure? law suits over likeness imitations are quite common, this is pretty much removing the stickers and reselling it as a different product.

I think the only thing that works for the favor atm, is that it's not in production anymore, if this was still being sold on the market they would get an S&D for sure.

Normally "law suits over likeness imitations" imply a lost sale by the plaintiff since a customer bought an alternative product after being confused by the likeness. This is the basis for the complaint and damages.

This is not the case here. Presumably every refurbished laptop was originally sold by the plaintiff, so there is no lost sale. It is no different from selling second hand goods. See the first sale doctrine.

A Lenovo Thinkpad X200 is itself a rebadged Wistron Mocha-1, if you want to think of it that way.

Despite what companies like HP/Compaq, Gateway, Dell, Lenovo, etc. want you to think, their products are actually mostly just branded by them, and mainly the work of ODMs such as Compal, Inventec, Pegatron, Quanta, and Wistron. Looking on the motherboard often reveals the true name and manufacturer of the product:

http://www.laptopschematic.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/Mo...

(HannStar is the manufacturer of the actual PCB.)

Most stuff is like this. If you pick up an HP, Casio or TI calculator these days you'll find they are all Kinpo calculators with slightly different firmware.

I want freedom from ugly stickers on new laptops! I currently have to take a blow-dryer to remove them.

"The Free Software Foundation loves this laptop, but you won't" http://www.pcworld.com/article/2879086/the-free-software-fou...

Why the FSF loves these old ThinkPads

- Trisquel GNU/Linux operating system.

- The low-level firmware on the laptop was replaced.

They also have great keyboards, great pointing devices, no irritating touch pad, and are highly portable and highly robust. It would be nice if there was something newer that actually compared on these fronts, but there just doesn't seem to be. (I am using a 2015 MBP presently and it's pretty ghastly compared to any of my X-series Thinkpads, except the X1 which is even worse.)

One bummer about these is that the aspect ratio isn't 4:3, though.

I haven't used old Thinkpads but my current x250 is great:

1)great pointing device - check (the buttons are back)

2)no annoying touch pad - it's there but it's small and easy to set to very low sensivity (I use it only for occasional quick click with my thumb)

3)highly portable - check + great battery life (I sometimes get more than 15 hours)

I've got 8gb of RAM but 16GB chip is already available (RAM is not soldered but there is only one slot). The display (IPS 1920x1080) is fantastic and the keyboard is fantastic as well (well, apparently it depends if you are lucky to get it from one manufacturer over the other).

I am not a fan of 16:9 but other than that I love almost everything about this laptop.

I just wish they would make something like this on newer hardware

It might be possible with the new Rockchip ARM Chromebooks (more specifically Asus). It's been discussed in the Libreboot mailing list lately.

Librem 13 and Librem 15v2 [1] are one blob away from being FSF-certifiable. And they are brand new hardware.

[1] https://puri.sm/

> one blob away

I'll believe it when I'll see it. All we have is their word for it, and I really don't like the way they are promoting their product so far.

It will literally never happen. Intel would never give this up.

They are also expensive as all shit.

Maybe they can subsidize it a bit by adding a bunch of malware. Root kits, spyware and adware are popular choices.

They are selling you a standard laptop, with standard hardware, commercial bios and firmware for a huge premium on price.

The only difference is that it comes with Linux, but a Dell XPS Dev edition with Ubuntu for nearly half the price and you're set.

It isn't going to happen, at least not through the use of Libreboot [0], which is what the X200 in the parent article relies on for their firmware replacement. The X200 is one of the latest support ThinkPad models, as the newer ones also use Intel Management Extensions. Without replacing these binary blobs with free software you won't be able to get the FSF certification. [1] Or would it fall under the "secondary embedded processor" exception?

>Will the Purism Librem laptops be supported?

>Probably not. There are several privacy, security and freedom issues with these laptops, due to the Intel chipsets that they use. See #intel. There are signed proprietary blobs which cannot be replaced (e.g. Intel Management Engine and CPU microcode updates). It uses the proprietary Intel FSP blob for the entire hardware initialization, which Intel won't provide the source code for. The Video BIOS (initialization firmware for the graphics hardware) is also proprietary.

>It will likely take many years to replace even one of these blobs, let alone all of them. Some of them (ME firmware and microcode) can't even be replaced, which immediately disqualifies these laptops from being added to libreboot.

[0] http://libreboot.org/faq/#librem

[1] https://www.fsf.org/resources/hw/endorsement/criteria

Purism claims to have gotten access to intel CPUs specially fused to run unsigned Management Engine firmware, and it claims to have made progress on a minimal replacement for the ME firmware.

The plan for the microcode is to just not ship any updates, either in the bios or the default distro.

The other parts will indeed take a lot more time, but it isn't hopeless.

https://puri.sm/posts/pioneering-cpu-efforts-to-liberate-lap...

https://puri.sm/posts/weekly-update-on-librem-production-201...

Wow, I wonder how they pulled that off. It's certainly a good start, but since it will be shipping with non-Free (though replaceable) BIOS binaries it would still fall short of the Respects Your Freedom hardware certification requirements. I did some digging since I have little knowledge of the Purism project. The Purism project offers an estimate of one year for replacing the non-Free blobs in the firmware. The Libreboot FAQ says that it could take years to replace the Intel FSP or Video BIOS, much less both. Given that a Coreboot developer has expressed doubts [0, 1] about the bold claims the Purism project has made in the past I'm inclined to take the word of the folks working on Libreboot. If by the time, if ever, a truly Libre product ships from Purism will it be any less dated than the X200 we have now?

[0] http://blogs.coreboot.org/blog/2015/08/09/the-truth-about-pu...

[1] http://blogs.coreboot.org/blog/2015/02/23/the-truth-about-pu...

An i5 @ 2.2 GHz w/ 4 GB of RAM starting at $1649 or an i7 @ 3.0 GHz w/ 4 GB of RAM starting at $1849!? Wow, good luck selling those.

Yep.

I paid $170 (in UK money) for a 2.4GHz i5 520M X201 with 4Gb of RAM...

For me, this is exactly what I've been waiting for. Every time there is a free software laptop (and it's not aimed at really poor people or at weighing only 20 grams) it's hugely expensive because of small scale with high end hardware. And usually it doesn't ship to the Netherlands either. This one, or at least a variant they link to, actually fixes all of this. Choosing the 240gb ssd option, the price is still quite reasonable (and SSDs are just fast, almost regardless of the rest of your setup).

They claim they can't do it on any new Intel hardware because the hardware is fundamentally incompatible with the FSF's goals: http://libreboot.org/faq/#intel

So find an ARM SoC vendor that will make hardware that is compatible with their goals?

Yea, what is also fun is that you already are running nonfree microcode when you boot any x86 processor, making skipping microcode updates useless.

The closest is Rockchip's RK3288 which is found on some Chromebooks. Its GPU still relies on blobs, which is their main argument against it, but since that code isn't signed (unlike the ME firmware) at least it _can_ be replaced.

Somebody is working on "liberating" the firmware side of Asus Chromebook Flip (mostly work to make it useful for non-Chrome OS situations), and I guess volunteers are welcome for the GPU side. (some ARM Mali)

Because a Core Duo and GMA combo is the very definition of respecting freedom. ;)

I love how they called it a "small ultraportable".

The X200 is also a viable self-defense tool, unlike those pesky macbooks!

Too bad 2GB has been unusable for a decade or so.

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