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Pistos
Apprentice
Apprentice


Joined: 29 Jul 2003
Posts: 175
Location: Canada

PostPosted: Sat Mar 26, 2016 2:13 am    Post subject: MiniFree laptops + Gentoo? Reply with quote

Has anyone tried Gentoo on a https://minifree.org laptop? Or tried MiniFree at all, in general? If so, how have you found it?
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asturm
Developer
Developer


Joined: 05 Apr 2007
Posts: 8933

PostPosted: Sat Mar 26, 2016 10:13 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Well, no, but since these are mostly 'refurbished' ThinkPads they can only be recommended, hardware-wise. I'm still running Gentoo on that low-voltage X200s from 7 years ago (it does pack 8GB RAM) and it is the perfect mobile workhorse (I happen to do actually most of my work on it, when docked), the 9-cell battery lasts 10-12 hours for office tasks. Should something break, spare parts supply couldn't be better (mine just received a new fan, set of nipples and battery, got it within 3 days) and servicing is easy. Building LibreOffice takes some time, sure, but putting an SSD inside makes even these old machines respond with minimum latency. Screen resolution is where these laptops often fall short, unfortunately, mine has also lived for that long because it has at least the rare 1440x900 part, all the others from that era will mostly stop at 1280x800...

Looking at the pricing, the 'freedom' really needs to be worth the money, or support, to you, otherwise you can get such machines a lot cheaper. Docking won't work with Core/Libreboot, iirc.
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Roman_Gruber
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Joined: 03 Oct 2006
Posts: 3846
Location: Austro Bavaria

PostPosted: Sat Mar 26, 2016 7:03 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

it seem it is lenovo. that says all.

lenovo is known for spyware in everthing, tons of pages, i wont say more

hardware wise, core2duo, i just sold the best cpu t9500 in a gamernotebook, age 7 years.

yes you can use that with gentoo but, you need a decent gpu and i doubt lenovo has that. intel gpus are crap of that age, sold anotehr laptop with build in i915 or i945 gpu from intel, no idea just remember all those debug messages. also integrated nvidia chipset of that age is not really recommendable.

something like 9800m gts from nivida for example is recommendable

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Hardware wise away

okay, you have the bios cleaned. but what is with the other electronics? nope and thats why i say, it is just a marketing gag

you could install an open bios on any supported mainboard, there are several ones available which i checked 3 years ago the last time

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price wise it is not worth for the age and the privacy issues lenovo had in past years => reference notebookcheck and otehr pages.

i also do not see much benefit on using open bios. uefi is bugged and that open bios sure has more issues as uefi

on laptops teh bios chip is soldered. i saw many guys selling trashed mainboards because they were foolish enough to desolder that chip with a cheap soldering iron which costs 10 cheeseburgers from the golen arches.

when you want to play with open bios, get a gigabyte desctop mainboard which has a second bios on board as a failback option.

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no one knows whats in the electronics and firmware (hardware and software wise), so just using no binary blobs and open bios will not make it more trustable at all.

I sggest you install gentoo in luks, so you can saefely dispose the harddisc when it dies and thats it, just buy something which is price wise a good deal.
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asturm
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Joined: 05 Apr 2007
Posts: 8933

PostPosted: Mon Mar 28, 2016 9:04 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

tw04l124 wrote:
something like 9800m gts from nivida for example is recommendable

Recommending an old Nvidia GPU that is only receiving legacy binary driver support at this point is the single worst thing you could do. Not commenting on the rest.
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electroman90
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Joined: 28 Mar 2016
Posts: 3

PostPosted: Thu Mar 31, 2016 5:14 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I can pretty much guarantee you Minifree laptops are cheap eBay fixer uppers cleaned up a bit, sticker applied, and free BIOS flashed.

Save your money and flash a free BIOS on an x-series yourself :)
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