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Comment by homosaur | Hacker News Reader

The one thing I get kind of annoyed with Stallman at is that he keeps mentioning this Leemote machine he has, which runs free software even in the BIOS. He might as well say that he runs Linux on a magical unicorn.

I have tried and never been able to get my hands on one of these things. I'd really like to see Stallman jump off his insistence on free for one second and maybe suggest something realistic for users who care about free software but aren't willing to work on an obscure, unavailable 7" netbook.

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Freedom Included is a company that got set up in Cambridge specifically to sell the Lemote. They ship internationally apparently through a partner (can't vouch for it). The folks who run the site seemed like decent enough people, so I think it's on the up-and-up. (I haven't bought one though)

If you actually want one of these things, it looks like about $450:

http://freedomincluded.com/

Ironically you have to buy it through Amazon which Stallman detests: http://stallman.org/amazon.html.

Ironic that this ships via Amazon!

Oh, it's a 10.1 inch, that actually makes it quite a bit more usable. Thanks for the link.

> If you actually want one of these things, it looks like about $450:

Why can't I get it for free?

I've wanted to purchase a Leemote laptop/computer for a while now, and each time I go searching for them I come back empty handed.

That being said, a quick Google search did return valid results this time around, particularly that it is for sale on Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/Screen-Lemote-Yeeloong-8101_B-Netbook/...

It is a $499 dollar 10.1" netbook that runs at 1 Ghz with 1 GB of ram and a 160 GB hard disk. With a display at 1024 x 600, which is slightly smaller than an iPad 1/2 screen.

If you are into freedom it might be worth it, but i'd have a hard time getting development work done on a screen that small, let alone on something running at 1 Ghz with a single core.

Actually I hope that developers start using less powerful machines with less screen estate, less memory, less CPU power and less battery. That should make them care about things like focused UX, memory consumption and power-aware programming.

I used a slow PowerPC machine with Linux for a while. After that I really realised how important is to use non-proprietary packages (do you want to scan? here is a 20KB x86-only binary needed for some strange DRM thing) or how important it is to decouple applications from libraries (so that you have to compile less things and spend less time watching your compiler run).

I work on building distributed fault tolerant high performance server systems. Compiling all of the code for the project on a Core 2 Duo with 4 GB of ram takes about 2 minutes and uses about 2.5 Gb of ram while linking.

I don't care about power consumption or UX with what I am currently working on, it is going to be running on 64 core beasts with 128 GB's of ram...

That being said, as a developer I still want a generous amount of screen real estate to get more work done faster, the more code I can display on my screen the better I can and faster I can develop without having to get my tasks back on track, without having to context switch.

I understand where you are coming from, and I understand the idea behind it, but at the end of the day I want to spend less time waiting for my compiler.

"a quick Google search did return valid results this time around, particularly that it is for sale on Amazon."

It's kinda amusing that in your quest for more RMS-inspired freedom you came in contact with two of his companies-non-gratae.

I didn't really want it for RMS-inspired freedom, as a hardware hacker/tinkerer I think it would be interesting to own a machine where I could change the way the BIOS worked, where I can get full access to the datasheets.

Some of RMS's policies and ideas and thoughts seem completely foreign to me... for example, I absolutely love my iPhone and enjoy working on OS X as my day to day machine, but every so often I really just want to tinker and that is when I enjoy hardware/electronics (such as the MSP430, Atmel AVR, and others)...

Yeah, this is the same reason I would like it. I'd actually like to hack on the BIOS and learn more about the full stack of technology in general. I think if you only worked in terminal it would be quite enough beef to run with. I think X would even work alright if you ran with a low end WM or none at all. You're probably not going to get LibreOffice going but I bet Abiword runs great. I was running X on Pentium II with no WM recently so I think it would be good on this machine.

I have an (old) aspire one with about the same characteristics, but for the processor which is an Atom and the RAM which is 512MB. Limited memory is the only seriously annoying factor for web browsing, but I have no problem running vim or emacs on this machine... And you can connect it to a bigger screen. And it's really lightweight.

The biggest thing for me is the processor speed, and the ram. When I am linking our proprietary code base it can use up to 2.5 Gb of ram ...

YMMV. Anything running X-Window, a browser and vim is OK for me. I could develop on a 300 Mhz Ultra-5 (I have one :)

Get a laptop capable of running Coreboot. Then you can install Coreboot and Linux (I won't say GNU/Linux, sorry, the GNU tools are the worst part of Linux) and have free software all the way down.

The new Chromebooks from Google should be running Coreboot, Linux, and Chromium, all of which are free software. I guess that's also an option.

Edit: also, I think this netbook, coupled with Stallman's 40 years of EMACS use, is at least partially responsible for RMS's severe RSI :)

The dirty little secret of the Chromebooks is that they won't be "free enough" for RMS.

However with manageable effort AMD notebooks should be coreboot-capable (and in fact, one developer aims at coreboot support for one of the HP 635 models)

Try here instead: http://www.tekmote.nl/epages/61504599.sf/en_GB/?ObjectPath=/...

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