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System76 News: Coreboot and Linux Advances

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Re: System76 News: Coreboot and Linux Advances

#131

Post by NikolaNovak »

pimeys wrote: post #97
NikolaNovak wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anything here will be Anecdata at best, but I've bought 3 refurb t420 and t420s; these are 8 years old now and still daily drivers for all my family members. The t420s in particular is my all-time favourite laptop of last 20 years, as it's thin and portable, but still modular (t420 is significantly thicker and more old-school portable), easy to upgrade and maintain, and with great keyboard with standard layout. I hav…

Same here. Although for work I prefer a workstation with enough cores for compilation. Just bought an X230, put OpenBSD in it and it is just perfect in the summer house. Put a SIM card in it and connect to the internet from everywhere. Superb keyboard, fast, small, durable, everything replaceable. I also have a T25 at home for development and can't say anything bad from that either, albeit a bit too big for carrying…

X220 and X230 always seemed like smaller than modern T25/T480, but far thicker, almost as thick as the T220 of that generation. Can you comment on that? I'm extremely interested but not willing to trade width for thickness :|

(my ideal complement to current stable would be a 10" or 11" think 8GB linux-compatible... and while dreaming, with a trackpoint. The whole netbook market seems to have bloomed than disappeared - but if ever there was a place to use the little red nubbin instead of tiny trackpad, that was it I think:)

Re: System76 News: Coreboot and Linux Advances

#132

Post by pknopf »

deanclatworthy wrote: post #98
tonysickpony wrote: post #63

I love Pop!_OS. I have used Gentoo, Ubuntu and Arch in the past 10 years. I ended up with Antergos packaged version of Arch with a bunch of personal tweaks. I tried different distro every now and then but always ended disappointed. My only needs for distros are to install softwares I use and run them. It turns out to be significantly hard, none of the distros do that without glitches, screen tearing and inconsistency…

Forgive me for asking, but what is different about this than Ubuntu 19.04? I looked through the POP!_OS (terrible name btw) promo page [1] and the majority of the things it's talking about are basic Gnome features shipped with Ubuntu? [1] https://system76.com/pop

It doesn't really add anything.

It does however, break things.

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/503481/why-does-apt...

I would steer clear of it unless it actually provides anything other than a default nvidia setup.

Re: System76 News: Coreboot and Linux Advances

#133

Post by shmerl »

monocasa wrote: post #129
wahern wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But DRM only requires a secret key in the hardware. None of the implementing code needs to be secret, and indeed DRM that relies on opaque binary blobs or convoluted setup is useless. If the issue is why Intel, AMD, NXP, etc aren't more transparent with their references, DRM doesn't really explain any of that. The only reason that makes sense to me other than sheer neglect is fear of IP infringement claims, a fear th…

> But DRM only requires a secret key in the hardware. None of the implementing code needs to be secret, and indeed DRM that relies on opaque binary blobs or convoluted setup is useless. DRM for a general purpose device needs way more than that. You need a full 'Trusted Execution Environment' to run the code that uses those keys.

Trusted execution doesn't need blobs, no? I.e. you can have secure boot with perfectly open booting. DRM is only used against the user, not for making things secure for the user. That's why DRM is relying on blobs.

Re: System76 News: Coreboot and Linux Advances

#134

Post by alexcabrera »

ohithereyou wrote: post #124
Jean-Philipe wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is why I became a Mac user. Heard this from so many people. We have the latest (2017-2018) MBP at work and every single one has serious keyboard problems. Other than that, I have had crashes and random reboots when on battery, with a black screen error message, sound issues (solved by turning volume down, switching outputs back and forth, or rebooting) wifi problems (solved by switching off bluetooth). And don…

>brew is miles away from apt. brew is also miles away from what it used to be. They have recently changed their philosophy about building from source and software support compiled into their built bottles. Did you know that neither mpv or mplayer bottles ship with libdvdread support? Building mplayer from source fails due to an error building libavcodec against x264. For some reason, the x264 version is not being cor…

> Did you know that neither mpv or mplayer bottles ship with libdvdread support?

Maybe because Apple doesn't ship a computer with a DVD drive and hasn't for ~5 years?

Re: System76 News: Coreboot and Linux Advances

#135

Post by pimeys »

NikolaNovak wrote: post #131
pimeys wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here. Although for work I prefer a workstation with enough cores for compilation. Just bought an X230, put OpenBSD in it and it is just perfect in the summer house. Put a SIM card in it and connect to the internet from everywhere. Superb keyboard, fast, small, durable, everything replaceable. I also have a T25 at home for development and can't say anything bad from that either, albeit a bit too big for carrying…

X220 and X230 always seemed like smaller than modern T25/T480, but far thicker, almost as thick as the T220 of that generation. Can you comment on that? I'm extremely interested but not willing to trade width for thickness :| (my ideal complement to current stable would be a 10" or 11" think 8GB linux-compatible... and while dreaming, with a trackpoint. The whole netbook market seems to have bloomed than disappeared…

They are thick and sturdy. That's what I like about them. Thick, but with a 35W CPU that can do miracles. Utilitarian piece of hardware so far away of thin modern laptops, I just like them a lot.

Re: System76 News: Coreboot and Linux Advances

#136

Post by tracker1 »

thekyle wrote: post #73
tracker1 wrote: post #39

Aside: page doesn't load with uBlock enabled...

I have uBlock Origin installed and it works fine with the default lists.

To my recollection, I never changed the install... unless a new google profile login to chrome carries settings from another, previous chrome install for the plugin. Because if I did change the lists, it was literally years ago, and I wouldn't have added an esoteric option.

I only know it didn't render when I came in... disabled uBlock Origin, and it did render.

Re: System76 News: Coreboot and Linux Advances

#137

Post by cbsmith »

bwat49 wrote: post #126
darrmit wrote: post #76

I love the idea of System76 and Coreboot and keep checking in on them every few months but the story seems to remain the same - horrible battery life. I can’t see dropping over 1k on a laptop that barely lasts 4 hours out of the box.

The new darter pro gets decent battery life, I get around 7 hours on mine. It has similar hardware to the galago pro, but with a 54 whr battery instead of 35 whr. Their other models do have poor battery life though. The galago pro is especially egregious, I don't know why anyone would buy a 13 inch laptop that only gets 3 hours of battery.

I actually had considered it at one point. Sometimes the reason you want something small & compact is you don't need to run it for that long.

Re: System76 News: Coreboot and Linux Advances

#138

Post by Fnoord »

scandox wrote: post #112
Fnoord wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rolling distributions simply do not provide the stability for serious production environments.

Is a desktop a production environment?

Time is always money one way or another. Time is ever so precious.

Even if you disagree, if a pentester uses Kali Linux (a Debian-based rolling release distribution), and they get paid for it, yes. Even then, Kali Linux regularly breaks, so a solution is to run it on VMs with snapshots (or communicate to each other when it breaks, or use a microSD card for a working version).

There's also a clear advantage: you get the newest versions of software much quicker than an OS which updates every half year (or a LTS version which gets updated less often).

Re: System76 News: Coreboot and Linux Advances

#139

Post by ohithereyou »

alexcabrera wrote: post #134
ohithereyou wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>brew is miles away from apt. brew is also miles away from what it used to be. They have recently changed their philosophy about building from source and software support compiled into their built bottles. Did you know that neither mpv or mplayer bottles ship with libdvdread support? Building mplayer from source fails due to an error building libavcodec against x264. For some reason, the x264 version is not being cor…

> Did you know that neither mpv or mplayer bottles ship with libdvdread support? Maybe because Apple doesn't ship a computer with a DVD drive and hasn't for ~5 years?

Their formula does not disable libdvdread support, but their build from source process fails to detect it if it is otherwise installed. A build from the vanilla source tarball picks it up just fine. So this is not a "Homebrew decided to disable this option", it seems to be a "Homebrew's build process actively avoids searching for other installed software even when the authors of that underlying software enable support by default".

Re: System76 News: Coreboot and Linux Advances

#140

Post by NikolaNovak »

pimeys wrote: post #135
NikolaNovak wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

X220 and X230 always seemed like smaller than modern T25/T480, but far thicker, almost as thick as the T220 of that generation. Can you comment on that? I'm extremely interested but not willing to trade width for thickness :| (my ideal complement to current stable would be a 10" or 11" think 8GB linux-compatible... and while dreaming, with a trackpoint. The whole netbook market seems to have bloomed than disappeared…

They are thick and sturdy. That's what I like about them. Thick, but with a 35W CPU that can do miracles. Utilitarian piece of hardware so far away of thin modern laptops, I just like them a lot.

Thx! I agree with utility part,I just found t420s so much more usable than t420, while retaining modularity and maintainability. Feels easier to lug around than x220/230,if it's less heavy etc. Hmmm...!
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