[nmglug] New Blood

[Sam Noble]

On Tue, May 9, 2017 at 4:26 PM, Mark Waid <fleabass4 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hello!  I live in Albuquerque and just found your group on the internet.
> I would love to come and attend and see what its all about.  Do I just show
> up with my computer?

Yep, we're very informal and all are welcome!

On Wed, May 10, 2017 at 10:29:55AM -0600, casey dentinger wrote:
> I have an ASUS C201 Chromebook with a Rockchip 3288 SoC.  Google left the
> keys in the bootloader so I have installed libreboot.

Ooh cool.  There's a fair amount of discussion WRT to the future of fully
liberated hardware possibly being non-x86 stuff. If you've seen the EOMA68
stuff: https://nmglug.org/libre-tea-computer-card-show-your-support/ It's worth
noting that the _next_ EOMA68 card in the works (after the A20 from the current
crowdfunding) is also a rockchip 3288 SoC. So I've been pretty tempted to pick
one of those C201s.

> Now I want to run sway, a port of the i3 window manager for Wayland.

Tiling FTW. I've yet to see Wayland doing anything more exciting than breaking,
so this will be fun too!

> I actually had it sort of working in arch but the opengl enabled graphics
> driver (veyron_libgl) causes wlc to segfault.  Without that driver the video
> was too choppy to be enjoyable.

I think I've seen mention that there are still no free video drivers for the
MALI gpu on this thing. LIMA seems to have stalled permanently with a fair
amount of bad blood between the dev and ARM.

> I would like to try updating the kernel from the ancient 3.14, but I bet
> I'm going to have trouble without whatever Chromebook specific stuff it
> has.

Yeah this would be cool to see. You need the linux-sunxi kernel right? Or are
you thinking a kernel.org or linux-libre kernel has enough upstreamed to get it
working?

> Also there is clearly a working video driver on the ChromeOs install, but I
> don't know how to make arch use it.  Either way the whole install is on a 2G
> microsd card so if I'm going to build a kernel I'll need to upgrade.

And this is why non-free software is (also;) pragmatically sucky.