talos.md 2.1 KB
% TALOS II Secure Workstation, from Raptor Engineering % Leah Rowe % 15 August 2017
Recently, Raptor Engineering has launched a new series of workstation and server computers. These are high-end systems, using the libre IBM POWER9 architecture, and the boot firmware is entirely Free Software like Libreboot.
This is the first OEM actually producing computers, from the factory assembly line, with completely libre boot firmware. The boot firmware, operating system and everything else is entirely Free Software. While not technically libreboot, the boot firmware on TALOS II is Free Software, so it was decided that the TALOS II would be promoted here on libreboot.org.
If you are in the market for a high-end, secure workstation or server with 100% free boot firmware (like Libreboot) and operating system, produced by an OEM hardware manufacturer that cares about freedom, look no further than the TALOS II from Raptor Engineering!
Their website for pre-orders is here: https://www.raptorcs.com/TALOSII/
An entry for the TALOS II has also been added to the suppliers page on libreboot.org.
Raptor Engineering is the same company that ported the ASUS KFSN4-DRE, KPGE-D16 and KCMA-D8 motherboards to Libreboot. In addition, they added support for Hybrid Graphics on the ThinkPad T400 which Libreboot supports, enabling those laptops to be used in freedom (with the AMD GPU disabled, in favour of the Intel GPU which Libreboot has free video initialization for).
In response to the TALOS II launch I, Leah Rowe, have removed the Libreboot D16 (TALOS II's main competitor) from minifree.org, and removed the Minifree D16 entries from the suppliers page on libreboot.org. I encourage Vikings and Technoethical, also present on that suppliers page, to do the same and discontinue their D16 products. The TALOS II is very important for the future of free, libre computing and indeed the free software community as a whole; if TALOS II fails, we will be stuck for a very long time without any viable high-end workstations that are libre. High-end hardware is necessary for modern software development.