Me and a few buddies wanted to make a mail-order service to libreboot computers. We'll have a PO Box and accept bitcoin. I've already librebooted 6 X200's, 2 X60T's, and one T500. I only have an X60 tablet and X200 still if anyone wants proof.
We don't have a name yet for our buisness. Right now we're thinking to charge $100 with no price of shipping. How does this sound?
tbh if i would go through the trouble of librebooting my shit i'd probably do it myself, the package could easily be intercepted by cia niggers
Angel Ross
I'll do it for 60, postage included.
Austin Allen
How is that possible? Even if you used a file-syncing program like Syncthing to check that a computer has the same firmware as the git repo, the program could conceivably be tampered with and given false data if the modifiers know what they're doing.
Liam Richardson
Well, we;ll disclose our process and not be doing weird shit like having you mail it to India or shit. We'll try to work out a ctypto-hash system. Our purpose for doing this is that we find mini-free to be overpriced in their service for librebooting computers. If you have more advice for making a transparent service, by all means share it. We're willing to take ideas.
Gabriel Thompson
How do you trust big companies to be fair though? Like, (((dell))), (((apple))), etc.
Jace Reyes
I'll do it for $59
Gavin Wilson
just record your brown hands messing with the hardware we've sent
Thomas Baker
REDDIT SPACING Wew. Someone here has zionist genes, uh?
Logan Brown
Glow in the dark here. Nice idea guys, we'll just interdict it during the shipping process.
Our thinking behind it is that Mini-Free offers their services for nearly $300 USD. Offering our services for $100 with no shipping fees would be a significant improvement which would also result in profit.
We are all white :)
Ayden Russell
Joking aside, if you can do it cheaper that's good enough for others needing a libreboot service but there is a rise of laptops disabling the Intel's ME and creating your own computer/laptop.
Eli Ward
Yeah, we're just trying to make a bit of money on the side. We think we won't get swamped and charging $100 per order will give us at least $300 a month or so. We're going to be like Web 1.0 websites still shilled on Usenet to replace VCR parts. Niche market, bt we get by.
Bentley Allen
Web 1.0 as in just plain html? A bit of css css3 has some cool animations you can do doesn't hurt.
Jason Powell
Well what I meant by that is the culture of it. On Usenet, you have mom-and-pop mail-order shops on the internet since 1996 and still going. It's impossible that they take in an income doing it, but it's niche to a hobby market so they keep on treding.
Jose Rodriguez
I will give you an advice how to libreboot your PC for $15 with equipment from China, and this advice is free. I think people would be more interested and willing to pay for coreboot/bios mods, ME removal on non-Thinkpad boards or tricky soldering operations performed by skilled people, like librebooting X200 Tablet. Also, OP, do you at least offer one-three-three-seven custom GRUB theme and payloads like Tetris or hidden encryption container? Plain Libreboot is boring, it can't even boot into Windows XP. I have no idea how would someone concerned perform this kind of audit if they are already too unskilled to install libreboot.
Isaiah Johnson
A lot of people choose to just pay a bit of a fee to just outsource the work. Nothing inherently wrong with that. We're simply providing a service people can choose to use.
Heh. Hadn't thought of that. We can offer a full HD encrypt and new OS install if you want. We haven't really thought about things like that yet. We can totally make some Libreboot themes if you people want them over defaults.
Again, back to my first point but we're not trying to be dishonest here. We just want to be fair. We'll try to be as transparent as possible, but as I said previously in this thread we're open to ideas on how to do this.
James Ramirez
Does the process include porting libreboot to my mobo?
Eli Moore
No, we're just offering putting Libreboot onto compatible models. We're not forking it or anything, all we're doing is charging you to flash your bios for you, for convienence.
Julian Turner
I can go to my local repair shop and ask them to flash any firmware on my bios for 30 bucks. What's the point of you doing it? If you are going to make a website, start with publicizing a good instruction guide.
Oliver Gomez
Well, we're just hobbiests trying to help out. And in my personal experience, local repair shops often are inept because their primary purpose is to sell you either new computers, Windows "Cleaner" software, or cell phones. I would not expect most of them to even know what LibreBoot is.
Minifree offers this service, and we're trying to simply be that but cheaper.
Aaron Cook
Maybe in your 56%ian flyover village, yes. Not in my country. But I was talking about competent repairmen, least example is Louis Rossmann, though he might not know what libreboot is, he is definitely capable of using firmware programmer.
Aiden Morris
All we are is a mail-order service to flash libreboot onto your computer. If you think $100 is too much, tell us a more decent price
Jordan Ross
I don't trust them. Isn't that why we're here?
David Bennett
People on ebay do it for 50.
Luis Carter
Make some bash scripts to iterate through a selected device's firmware and check that the code in the corresponding files matches with libreboot's git repo. Add them to Tinycore Linux and upload it as a complete ISO, to be run as a live environment. Rip off the code used to find devices for installation in Archbang (easiest to install out of terminal-installed Linux distros). Finding code to iterate through firmware files might be harder. Python web scrapers are readily available. Make a Python file corresponding to the following pseudocode:
define webscrape(num) call dedicated webscraper tell it to look for file #num in git repo download file #num convert file #num to .txt return .txt file
define processing_function (firmware_file, number) open file with ed copy text stream to temporary.txt if webscrape(number) matches up with temporary.txt delete webscrape(num)'s output return true else delete webscrape(num)'s output return false
libreboot_test = true list of file names list of sorted files for (firmware file start : firmware file end) if file isn't in list of file names processing_function(current_file, current_file_number) if processing_function == true libreboot_test = true else libreboot_text = false end loop
if libreboot_test = true print "this computer is running libreboot" else print "this computer is not running libreboot"
Then use a bash script (with an icon to run it on the desktop, the only button preferably) to ask the user for internet connection before running the python file and checking the firmware. IDK if this is how firmware files actually work or not. I'm assuming that it's much like file processing in higher rings. Obviously this won't work if the computer files aren't in the exact same order as in the git repo, but it's trivial to write a .c file which runs the text input through strcmp and bubblesort them alphabetically for each folder in the repo. Call that several times if you need to. Sorry about double post, but can't delete other one because no javascript. Also, I might be retarded atm because I'm writing at 3AM.
Jose Murphy
...
Nicholas Kelly
Stopped when she said entrepreneur.
Brody Martinez
Fuck, wrong thread.
Jason Russell
dum
Gabriel Martinez
It's $260 for a PO Box for 3 months. Out of $100 about $30 to $60 go to shipping both ways. That leaves $70 at best or $40 at the worst then 35% goes to paying for the domain name/website and my guy who'll act as customer support. After all that I get $45.50 at the most which all goes to the PO box. I'd need 6 to 9 orders to break even.
Zachary Moore
why do you need the po box?
Nathan Moore
Hey guys, send me your notebooks and a hundred bucks, I will totally tranny boot it for you and not just run off with both your money and chinkbook
Andrew Butler
Nobody would trust an anonymous on tinkering with their hardware.
Kayden Cook
Why do people not simply libreboot/coreboot their computer themselfs?
I mean, it costs nearly nothing. Just buy a rasp pie, and the needed components from aliexpress. Follow the tutorial. How hard is that?
Nathan Cruz
Wait, while I'm thinking about it, why would anyone interested in libreboot not be able to install it himself? Seriously, Holla Forums is dead. Too much "larpers" and kids here.
There is fucking everything. A shit tone of photos.
You're just fucking lazy.
Julian Scott
you should take monero too. additionally:
Jace Diaz
I'm pretty sure Terry was a /g/ meme before he became a Holla Forums one
Christopher Cook
$58.99.
Nathaniel Long
There's that, and the fact that you have to buy all the parts to do hardware flashing in the first place. Also the X200 Tablet, besides requiring a lot of disassembly, needs soldering. For mine I got someone else to help out with that part, the wires are permanently attached and accessible by just removing the palmrest. Much more manageable.
Dominic Butler
You only need a RPi and a SOIC clip. With models like X60/T60 I'm fairly sure you can do it simply via software.
Xavier Roberts
you need cables
Ian Adams
Dudd, did you think about taping wires inside RAM bay, there's plenty of space there. Also, did you update the EC firmware from livecd beforehand?
You do not need Raspberry, who the fuck started this maymay? You need any flashrom compatible programmer and a $5 USB power supply.
Cables are like $1/kilo
Nathaniel Hughes
I used a SOIC clip to flash the X200s did. No need to solder.
Xavier Parker
Still better (and a lot easier) than using a BeagleBone with external PSU and even external hard drive as OP appears do be doing.
Me neither on a x200 (w/ chip at 16 pins), had to spend 15 bucks on the clip, though. I believe you may have to solder the cables directly on the chip on the tablet models, which have some sort of unclippable BIOS chip.
Julian Morris
Palmrest is fine given how often I have to do it.
Must've missed that. Does it really matter? I think I've got the original BIOS somewhere, or maybe it'd work with the hacked one that doesn't whitelist wifi cards and stupid nonsense.
Regular X200 systems are easy. It's the tablet variant that isn't because the flash is on the underside of the mainboard, and it's a different flash type with no test clips. You can swap it with one that is but the wire approach was more sensible since it's in such an awful place. You have to take pretty much everything out.
Logan Price
And they got the nerve to tell other people that they are stealing their memes.
Wyatt Morgan
Yeah, sounds fine but you should also expand your efforts and include installation of Coreboot and ME cleaner on compatible devices.
Elijah Phillips
How much would it cost for my macbook pro
Cameron Sullivan
I think we're getting to that point where this older hardware is starting to become unsustainable. We need better devices with completely free software from the ground up. These laptops still have non-free firmware somewhere even after being librebooted. Theres really only a few boards and a shitty Chromebook that are fully non-free, or near to free.. and CPUs also have microcode.
Daniel Collins
noic b8 m8
Henry Morales
Yes but you must also offer recordings of yourself actually doing it.
Joshua Walker
mailing it to a PO box and paying in BC is weird shit.