New release of Libreboot, soon.

Reminder: all Libreboot machines are currently on a heavy discount, on Minifree:

Minifree Ltd – Linux/BSD preinstalled laptops with Libreboot BIOS replacement

Minifree Ltd – Linux/BSD preinstalled laptops with Libreboot BIOS replacement

Minifree Ltd – Linux/BSD preinstalled laptops with Libreboot BIOS replacement

I'm the founder and lead developer of the Libreboot project. Sales fund Libreboot. Libreboot (preinstalled) is free/opensource firmware replacing proprietary BIOS/UEFI on supported hardware. I did a release recently, namely Libreboot 20241008. Your choice of Debian Linux, other distro or a BSD. I'm raising money for some planned work in November, hence price cut going for increased sales.

I'm doing a clearance sale of the Libreboot 9020. *Heavy* price reduction:

Minifree Ltd – Libreboot T480 with 4-core i5-8250u, Intel UHD 630 graphics, 32GB/64GB DDR4 RAM, Intel AX210 WiFi, 1TB/2TB NVMe SSD and Debian Linux

Minifree Ltd – Libreboot T480 with 4-core i5-8250u, Intel UHD 630 graphics, 32GB/64GB DDR4 RAM, Intel AX210 WiFi, 1TB/2TB NVMe SSD and Debian Linux

Minifree Ltd – Libreboot T480 with 4-core i5-8250u, Intel UHD 630 graphics, 32GB/64GB DDR4 RAM, Intel AX210 WiFi, 1TB/2TB NVMe SSD and Debian Linux

I'll have two new products in November, but I still have a lot of 9020 in the lab. *All 9020's must go!* The base 16GB RAM and 240GB SSD Libreboot 9020 setup with i5 is £138, plus shipping/VAT. It's quite a nice Haswell (Intel 4th gen) machine with free initialisation including raminit. Libreboot preinstalled, replacing proprietary BIOS/UEFI. Your choice of Linux/BSD setup (Debian by default).

Was chatting with one of my buddies on jitsi meet. he showed me this:

MPC One

MPC One delivers the standalone MIDI sequencing power of the flagship MPC X in a smaller footprint for any music production studio.

Music sampler thingy. I was super bored so I went to their downloads section:

MPC Software & Firmware Downloads | Akai Pro

AKAI Professional entered the electronic music industry in 1984 with one purpose - to give artists the tools they need to express and explore new m...

I started gutting it; the Windows updater app contains lzma archive inside. Inside *that*, from a specific offset, another lzma archive. extracted it and it was a ext2 file system image. Mounted it It's Linux. with glibc and busybox. No source code or written offer of source. GPL violation anyone?

Hah. Our man @npub1ns5c...ah7f is at it again: I've hinted at it in previous posts: I'm working on a new fork of DuckStation from before it went proprietary, and I will have it ready in a few days. I've heavily archived everything from Duckstation, even pull requests, wikis etc - I can't re-publish all of it, e.g. wiki text has no license. A number of contributors have reached out to me, who indeed confirm they *did not* authorise DuckStation's recent licensing changes.

Been playing with macOS for a new opensource project I'm working on. I only care about Linux/BSD, but the code I'm working on has Linux, Mac, Windows and Android ports, so I need to handle those. I'm teaching myself how to build software on macOS. I don't see how anyone stays sane using it. Windows is next. I've never used MacOS except briefly in 2007. I haven't used Windows since 2009. I now appreciate my Debian LXDE setup much more. So much simpler and easier to use. Superior in every way.

New Libreboot release soon.

I've been informed that a popular PlayStation emulator, called DuckStation, became proprietary software (was GPLv3, now PolyForm Strict 1.0.0 which restricts non-commercial usage and modification). DuckStation was Free Software. I've decided to archive DuckStation from before the license change. Please see:

Codeberg.org

duckstation

duckstation, but archived from the revision just before upstream changed it to a proprietary software project. this version is the libre one.

If you were using it, please ask the devs to change it back to GPL. Hardware preservation matters, as is preserving that preservation in a free-as-in-freedom way.