Last month I saw somebody on the fsfe mailing list talk about an OpenMoko phone. As I had one of those collecting dust in the drawer, I asked if anybody was interested. Promptly I got an offer to exchange it for a Lenovo X60 notebook with libreboot. I didn’t need another notebook, but libreboot seemed interesting enough, so I agreed. It came preinstalled with trisquel gnu linux, and with a docking station. I’m not sure if I heard about that distribution before. It is based on ubuntu, but includes only the free open libre stuff. The default desktop is gnome3. Since it’s a good fit with libreboot, I kept trisquel. The first impression was that it runs extremely well for such an old device. I was also amazed how rounded and complete a full on libre distro can be these days. Gone are the days where the compromises you had to make for freedom were hard to justify. The first thing, friends ask is about flash. But I don’t miss it at all, I mean html5 has been around for a while. At first, I started to install games for the kids. They run a lot better than on my old Atom netbook. As it’s my first device with a fingerprint reader, I had a little play installing this option for logging in, fully aware that it’s not that secure. The only two things that are not so optimal are sound and heat. Neither the speakers nor the headphones give any sign of live, event hough the operating system seems to have recognized the sound card. This is not such a big deal, as the bluetooth headphones still work perfectly. The other issue is that it heats up a lot under full load. And when the core temperature hits 100°C it just switches off. This happened a couple of times when the BitCoin BlockChain synchronized. And it still happens once every second day.
Then, my XPS13 was stolen, and I needed something to fill the gap until I have a proper replacement. I must say it does the job well. I miss the XPS13 a lot, but at least I have something I can work on. And who knows how long it takes before I have an XPS13 again. They recently announced a new version with tiny bezels around the screen, bigger SSD and newer processors. But the new developer edition is not available yet, and the old version is not available any more. When it becomes available, I want to pay it with BitCoin, which also is not available yet. Dell accepts BitCoin payments in the US, Canada and the UK. I hope they will soon roll out worldwide, or at least to the rest of Europe. Once I can order on my terms, I will still have to wait about a month for delivery.
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