FSF Certifies Three More Devices For Respecting Your Freedom

Written by Michael Larabel in GNU on 6 March 2017 at 12:57 PM EST. 17 Comments
GNU
The Free Software Foundation has announced three more devices that are certified for "respects your freedom" (RYF), including a laptop, motherboard, and USB sound adapter. But don't get too excited quite yet.

The devices certified are from Vikings GmbH and include their D16 motherboard, X200 laptop, and a USB stereo sound adapter. Their D16 motherboard is flashed to run Coreboot/Libreboot but it's not the first time this board has seen such treatment or even been certified... This board is the ASUS KGPE-D16 that is quite common in Libreboot/Coreboot circles for being an AMD Opteron board that can still be purchased through retail channels and plays nicely with a free software stack.

Vikings is selling their RYF-certified board for 833.00€ -- that's just for the motherboard without any RAM, CPU, etc. The board itself can still be bought new from Amazon for $415 USD, so for the Vikings price you could always just buy the board and flash it yourself, if you mess up, buy a second board and still make it out ahead financially.

Their certified laptop from the Germany company is the X200, and yes, it's a flashed Lenovo ThinkPad X200 set to run Coreboot/Libreboot and FSF's Trisquel Linux distribution. The laptop will set you back 297.50€ for their X200 model with a 2.4GHz dual-core CPU, 2GB RAM, no SSD storage, and a used battery. As is the case with many of these "free hardware" efforts, the costs come at a premium over traditional market prices.

Lastly is their USB stereo sound adapter that makes use of the C-Media CM119 chipset and is supported by the mainline kernel going back to the Linux 2.6.27 kernel and doesn't require any blobs to function. This stereo sound adapter sells for 11.90€.

If you are interested in these older devices that are now certified by the FSF, you can find the details via this announcement.
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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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