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Comment by phsource | Hacker News Reader

I didn't realize the significance of this, but searched a bit more, and found this:

> OpenBSD/loongson is a port intended to run on systems based upon the Loongson (also known as Godson) 2E and 2F MIPS-compatible processors, using the PMON firmware and boot loader

> ...

> Supported hardware:

> Lemote Yeeloong netbook [1]

The Lemote Yeeloong rang a bell, since it's one of the few computers that's "built on free software from the BIOS up" that was recommended by Richard Stallman [2]. Glad the effort to run this is still going strong and supporting the latest version of OpenBSD, released in May!

[1] https://www.openbsd.org/loongson.html

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemote

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Stallman's Lemote Yeelong got stolen while on a business trip. He has not been able to replace it with the same model because no longer made / sold out, so he is using a less free laptop now (forgot which, and might've changed).

It seems he is using a Thinkpad T400s computer with Libreboot [1] endorsed by the FSF.

[1] https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html

> Stallman's Lemote Yeelong got stolen while on a business trip.

Interesting, I never heard that story before. Did he use full-disk encryption? One could presume that Stallman has signing keys for some GNU projects, so wouldn't the loss of his personal computer represent a major security issue?

Only if he has signing keys on a mobile computer he takes on travel ... Which isn't a good idea to begin with.

(And yes, one could argue that a disk in an office or server could be stolen as well, whereas a laptop is in sight and loss is noted immediately, but I won't agree)

Aww I wish I had known. I actually gave my lemote laptop away becauee it was just gathering dust. Would have proudly given him mine.

I wish I had one. I would have proudly given him mine. I wonder if he'd accept it, given that he'd perhaps reason it would force me to give up my ehh.., freedom, I guess.

They're less well supported nowadays than they were. For instance, they used to be well supported by Parabola (one of the FSF-endorsed distros), but since then Parabola's dropped support for MIPS, because every Parabola developer working on MIPS either had their Yeelong crap out or get stolen; and they're hard to replace.

Also, MIPS has never been supported by Trisquel (another FSF-endorsed distro), and I suspect that since the lead Trisquel developer has since been hired as the senior sysadmin at the FSF, he gets some value out of giving RMS a laptop running Trisquel.

Ruben is now the CTO at the FSF :)

A Surface Pro? :)

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