
Preventing AMI’s BiOS from interfering with coreboot flashing on the Librem 13 - turblety
https://puri.sm/posts/preventing-interference-from-the-old-bios-while-flashing-coreboot/
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floatboth
Also looks like the coreboot payload/distro they'll be shipping is Heads!
[https://puri.sm/posts/purism-collaborates-with-heads-
project...](https://puri.sm/posts/purism-collaborates-with-heads-project-to-
co-develop-security-focused-laptops/)

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tyingq
Trammel Hudson, the guy behind Heads, does a lot of interesting maker type
projects too. His personal project site is worth checking out:
[https://trmm.net](https://trmm.net)

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jabl
Wov. How can one person find time for all that?

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carussell
Chromebooks use coreboot. What's the idea behind sourcing parts from upstream
vendors who are hostile to the goal of openness, rather than from some
manufacturer (e.g., Dell) already shipping Chromebooks?

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bubblethink
Good general purpose hardware. Chromebooks have limited soldered hardware
aimed at giving you enough power to get to Google's services, but not more.

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carussell
There are Chromebook configurations where a i3/i5/i7 CPU and 4GB/8GB/16GB RAM
are among your options. Just about the only thing that's consistently undercut
is storage capacity, but options also include Chromebooks with user-
upgradeable SSDs and SD slots.

It sounds like you're working off an outdated understanding of Chromebook
options, one where 2011-era limitations play a major role in your perception
of how suitable they are for getting work done.

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bubblethink
No, I'm quite aware of what chromebooks have to offer, and there isn't a
single general purpose workstation style chromebook. Find me an i7 (quad-core)
chromebook with 16+ GB of RAM and expandable storage. The closest was the 2015
Pixel, sold at some extortionate price, and still with limited storage.

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carussell
The thoughts in each of your two comments are at odds.

It also may be the case that there are no existing Chromebook configurations
that satisfy your criteria, but recall that the context here is a design and
manufacturing strategy for Purism to produce the Librem. There exist
Chromebooks with comparable specs and comparable price points. If you think
that existing high end Chromebooks are a bad value proposition, that's fine,
but then the same is true for you of the existing Librem, so what are we even
doing here?

Even disregarding that, what would there being no _existing_ Chromebooks have
to do with the discussion? We're talking about getting a shop who's interested
in producing a custom design work to try to source parts from more diverse and
more agreeable vendors. Of course you can't order that hypothetical machine
today—the fact that it doesn't exist is fundamental to the discussion.

Your comment only makes sense if the proposal here were, essentially, "Purism
needs to take an existing Chromebook and rebrand it as the Librem." But that's
not what I said, because there's no value in it and it wouldn't make
sense—you'd be better just buying the unrebranded version directly.

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bubblethink
I'm not sure what you are arguing for. I'm not entirely sold on their value
proposition. I just think that they are building something like a chromebook
without the conventional limitations of chromebooks. The talk of sourcing
friendly parts or replicating chromebook's methodology isn't very accurate
because a) The deals that Google can get can't necessarily be replicated by
others b) There probably aren't magical "friendly" parts. The parts are mostly
similar across laptops with significant engineering and s/w work done by
Google (for coreboot etc.), or by Purism in this case for their laptops.

