Re: [Tails-dev] interesting free tablet

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Author: Zlatan Todoric
Date:  
To: intrigeri, The Tails public development discussion list
Subject: Re: [Tails-dev] interesting free tablet
Hi friend and Tails folk,


On 05/21/2016 11:57 AM, intrigeri wrote:
> Hi,
>
> [adding Zlatan into the loop, since we know each other and he works
> it Purism.]
>
> BitingBird wrote (20 May 2016 20:54:38 GMT) :
>> https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/librem-11-a-2-in-1-to-protect-your-digital-life#/
>> It would be interesting to ask them if it works with Tails :)


Intrigeri being my friend, and Tails being used by Edward Snowden during
the whistleblow, I already talked inside company to add it to our offer
but the issue here is that people seem to be usually using tails on USB
drive for only live usage. If you can create OEM installation for us, we
would be happy to add it to our offer (I already asked Debian to do this
and they will provide it). Benefit is that from every Librem sold with
Tails, Tails community would get donation from Purism.

> Sure!
>
> From what I read, this is going to be a x86_64 platform, so in theory
> Tails should run on it. I already have a Tails booting on a tablet
> based on Intel BayTrail, so that new one should at least boot as well.
>
> Now, the problems I've had last time I played with Tails on tablets
> were about drivers: except the touchscreen, basically everything else
> required drivers or firmware that are not in Linux mainline, so it
> didn't work without patching the kernel a lot (and the source code for
> the drivers was not always easy to find, if available at all). So my
> next questions focus on this topic.
>
> Zlatan, will PureOS for this tablet include any additional driver,
> firmware or kernel patch that's not in Debian, e.g. for touchscreen,
> sound, backlight, 3G and various sensors?


Nope, PureOS is based on Debian testing main and my task was to find
hardware that can satisfy that request (even though supply chains like
to make mistakes, we would just refuse and continue our research and
work on it). Regarding 3G and other cellular things - we made space for
them but of course they will not work until FLOSS gets there and than we
would be able to enable such things without "forcing" people to buy new
devices.

>
> In particular, the section about "Freed Wireless AC Driver" makes me
> wonder: until that driver is freed, how exactly can one use Wi-Fi with
> a Librem tablet?


The wireless is the same as in laptops, so the connection will be N,
thus free driver. Stretch goal is to free AC (ath10k particular here in
mind) as N is unstable and not the best (if you move 10m from AP there
is a good chance you're loose connection).

>
> And one last question: these devices will be UEFI-enabled, right?


Sadly yes. We are still working on making it as Free as we can and of
course we will not stop working on that part.

>
> I'm interested in the answers for both the Librem 10 and Librem 11
> tablets, in case they differ.


Librem11 is basically as Librem laptops just with Intel M CPU (and
graphics of course but they are similar in benchmark, certainly not of
interest to Tails) instead of Intel i5 and i7.

Librem10 uses Intel Atom for tablets and has the mobile version of SSD
(eMMC while Librem11 has the full powered SSD). They all should work out
of the box with Tails.

Cheers,

zlatan