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The price of motherboard without the case expected to be in the 500-700 EUR range. Yes it's expensive compared to devices of similar specifications but that's due to the low production volumes. That's the price you must pay if you want a fully featured Linux computer in your pocket.

I hate to say this, but not *any* other device. The Openmoko Neo Freerunner has all drivers open source (including GPU) and http://projects.goldelico.com/p/gta04-main/ as well. The only things not free are the GSM firmware and the wifi firmware. The Freerunner original already has working (but not user friendly) FOSS GSM firmware with OsmocomBB http://bb.osmocom.org/
Oh but these aren't Android phones &_&

Sigh...he is NOT talking about putting it into ROM, that is impossible with that chip. What he is talking about is putting a software "lock" on the chip so you can NOT UPDATE and that somehow magically makes it a "circuit" which just shows how cult like the man is, how he can just manipulate language to his own ends.

This is about putting dedicated hardware on board to load default firmware from a flash-ROM into the Marvell WLAN chip, so you d o not need to load the firmware after every boot. There is plenty of explanation on the project page , and quite clearly it writes

The task is to develop a prototype of a microcontroller that sends an immutable firmware program through an SDIO interface into a Marvell 8686 based WLAN chip independently from the main CPU.

But why bother reading about details when it is so much fun to just complain and whine and repeat your half understood rants on half understood topics, right?

Its like how his FSF sues people for violating the GPL but he says stealing copyrighted code is fine and dandy, even labels it "sharing with a neighbor"...WTF?

I won't even start to tell you how many mis-statements are contained in this sentence, let alone the whole paragraph I'm not bothering to quote. Luckily /. features a Foes list that will save me from ever attempting to argue on any matter with you again.

There is a new generation of openmoko phones in the works. These phones are much more trustworthy than closed phones with binary blob OS that has been tampered with by the network provider as well. As far as I know nobody has user friendly LUKS support, but it shouldn't be too hard to add. http://projects.goldelico.com/p/gta04-main/

> Yep - can't root my Moko FreeRunner.

You also can't use it for meaningful data in the US. They (and Trolltech) stupidly decided to use a GSM chip that can't do EDGE, and only supports 1900/2100UMTS, instead of spending about $5 more to get the pin-compatible next version up that supported EDGE (and, I believe, 850/1900MHz UMTS), which means they're GPRS paperweights in the US.

Same in this country - except that I'm not interested in EDGE for data (GSM and EDGE are expensive data options here, 3G is cheap and built in to my netbook) I use mine as a phone ;-p. We bought a number of them and use them in a remote non-voice projects running Debian (we spent the holidays exploring the GSM stack, because we can). [aside] Who would have a phone that won't function? Oh yeah (hi Damian) the phone in discussion - designed for Data As A Service, but only to the phone - no USB transfer. Handy.

We have an order in for the GTA04 with Golden Delicious (byo case) - which are capable of the more useful 3G if it's data your after (I prefer my netbook for portable data). And again - you own the phone and pretty much everything is accessible and under your control (the GSM stack is difficult to get to, but that's outside the control of the manufacturer).

Being from the US you might not be aware that "root" has different meaning. Try telling people outside the US you root for your team and watch them back away (getting some ass is gay, and sitting on your fanny is something only women can do - and then with great difficulty).

if you've seen what happened to projects like the OpenPandora, the OpenMoko and so on

GTA04 is what OpenMoko became, and they're shipping on Monday.

Thanks to the FSF they have decided that somehow the device will be more Free if they add extra hardware to remove the ability load your own firmware for the wifi. I'd rather they threw the wifi chip away and use a worse chip which requires no non-free code or just accepted you need the non-free firmware, don't up the cost to embed the non-free firmware into the board itself and then pretend it doesn't exist, it's just dumb.

Firmware runs on a sub-device rather then your cpu and is really more part of the hardware rather then part of the driver. Just look at the mess the FSF are inspiring the OpenMoko guys to make of their next board (adding a chip with a firmware burned in, to remove the possibility of updating the firmware, just to sweep it under the carpet rather then shipping any non-free code).

To me your bug report really has more to say about the level of use of screen rotation rather then the implications of not shipping the firmware by default. It's unfortunate nobody picked up on it before it reached a Debian stable release, but despite being involved in a project where I would have expected to encounter someone hitting such a bug, this is the first I've heard of it.

Sorry if my reply upset you or seemed overly unfriendly, but I've seen far too many baseless slurs on the radeon code here over the years and before the clarification yours pushed my buttons again! Thanks for clarifying what you were really referring to, lack of firmware making things less capable and a bug where you could trigger a crash rather then a "sorry we can't do that without firmware" message. The radeons are one of the worst edge cases for the whole firmware debate as the devices can function without one but gain features with one AND there has been a previous project (radeonhd) that actually provided some of those features without a non-free firmware in the past but pragmatism made the developers decide that using the firmware was a saner long term course of action then maintaining all the extra low-level code for the card themselves in addition to the cpu based driver code.