Purism Highlights Challenges During Coreboot Development

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Purism Highlights Challenges During Coreboot Development

Taking a brief break from their Librem 5 smartphone campaign, there's a new Purism blog post today that explains at length why this summer's Librem laptop shipments were delayed due to a pesky Coreboot bug lasting weeks and what it took to come to a workaround...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Purism-2017-Coreboot-Summer

[nomadewolf]

It's good to see a company explaining stuff to it's customers.

[Guest]

They have must have gone through a lot of work: debugging, testing, and figuring out possible solutions,...

Sometimes, it's just few lines, which are needed. But, it takes days, and tons of knowhow, to write them.

I appreciate the work they do. Even though, I'm currently in favor of different type of laptops, than laptops they sell.

[Nille_kungen]

If it only was possible to order it with custom keyboard, an English keyboard is pretty useless here, unless you only write code.

[andrei_me]

Read the blog entry, it is easy and fun to read, been there as a developer when you try to debug a "schrödinger" bug

[Cape]

If it only was possible to order it with custom keyboard, an English keyboard is pretty useless here, unless you only write code.

Touch Typing! You don't have to look at the keyboard when you type. There is the good ol' klavaro to help you learn.

Anyway, I wonder if they gonna get the FSF certification now that they have coreboot. The only problem I see it's the CPU itself maybe?

[Adarion]

It's good to see purism seems to be more active now in that field.
But the biggest problems in the beginning were their somewhat naive(?) start. They were talking about nvidia / intel laptops and free software in the same sentence. Weird, at least to everyone who didn't live under a rock the last 10 years. Then they talked Coreboot, maybe even Libre-something. But they did not even get in contact with the real Coreboot people and later Coreboot people had to grant them a Coreboot implementation for their laptop...
But good to see that there is improvement. The world needs more libre firmware!

[oskar-n]

It is easy to use a US keyboard for european languages. To get á, press shift+'+a and to get ñ, press shift+~+n. Más 'speak spanish' que en España.

åäöÅÄÖ?

[Adarion]

By the way that blog

https://puri.sm/posts/coreboot-on-the-skylake-librems-part-2/

was funny to read, indeed. And it shows a few things. Like "vom Linux-Kernel lernen, heißt Siegen lernen" (to learn from the Linux kernel means to learn how to be victorious) and that SATA (at least on these systems), or general different devices via interface interaction, can be a pain. There still is an analog world behind it all (http://blog.asset-intertech.com/test...mv-part-2.html). Fine-tune register values you have to set by measuring hundreds of different possible SATA devices at your controller with expensive oscilloscopes. Yay!
Robust and fail-safe is something else, but probably not SATA that is supposed to work on a high perfromance level.

Reminded me of the MTP (who ever uses that instead of mass storage mounting?) failures I read about elsewhere this morning.

[M@GOid]

The Brazilian keyboard (ABNT2) cannot be emulated (remapped) using a US keyboard, simply because it have 2 extra keys (107 keys instead of 105 on a US-international full size keyboard). Other languages also have more keys than the US standard layout. So the laptop have to allow exchangeable layouts, like some Thinkpad laptops.

Sure, you can type the accents in another way, but it is a pain in the ass if you are proficient on your country layout. It simply do not worth the hassle.