Lessons from the Novena laptop project

Posted Aug 13, 2014 19:30 UTC (Wed) by njwhite (guest, #51848)
Parent article: Lessons from the Novena laptop project

Interesting article, and a very cool project! I'm tempted to order one myself, but I just don't have any use for it. Hopefully their success means that in ~10 years when my laptop breaks (yes, I'm a careful optimist) I can get a fancy new one Novena laptop.

> on his blog, Huang commented that the FSF would not certify the Novena in its "Respects Your Freedom" program, even though the laptop can be used with the binary-only units turned off and unloaded

Reading the comment, it sounds like once the reverse engineering is completed for the GPU and VPU, and free replacement drivers written (as is the plan), they should qualify, even without the DMA controller or boot rom code being free. Which is interesting; it seems like a reasonable place to draw the line for now, but presumably the FSF would love to see the boot ROM and DMA controller code be free too, someday.

Lessons from the Novena laptop project

Posted Aug 13, 2014 20:52 UTC (Wed) by b7j0c (guest, #27559) [Link] (3 responses)

I'd be tempted to buy one just to help underwrite development...but not for $2k. thats more money than I have spent on a workhorse laptop in some time.

Lessons from the Novena laptop project

Posted Aug 13, 2014 21:11 UTC (Wed) by n8willis (subscriber, #43041) [Link]

Interestingly enough, someone in the audience also asked about the price point. Cross replied that the comments break down into two distinct camps: FOSS people say "wow that's an expensive laptop" but FPGA users say "wow that's so cheap for a development kit!" The point being, many or most of Novena's specifications are geared toward hardware hacking and reverse-engineering usage, rather than traditional CPU-bound performance. So it probably isn't a "workhorse" in the same sense as other laptop-sized devices.

Nate

Lessons from the Novena laptop project

Posted Aug 14, 2014 16:19 UTC (Thu) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]

It's only really 2-3 times as expensive as a decent mid-range laptop. Which is not a huge amount considering it's a low volume affair.

The biggest advantages I see to this device are that everything is cabled together so you can easily swap parts, it's going to be fairly legacy free and must more 'trustworthy' laptop then you can typically get from consumer outlets, and the potential for hardware development/use in automation/general learning experience is extremely high.

Lessons from the Novena laptop project

Posted Aug 27, 2014 8:00 UTC (Wed) by ssam (guest, #46587) [Link]

https://www.crowdsupply.com/kosagi/novena-open-laptop they are still accepting general donations (choose the "Buy Us a Beer" options, and give however much money you'd like).