It's... "closely coupled with a Xilinx FPGA. It's designed for users who care about Free Software and open source, and/or want to modify and extend their hardware: all the documentation for the PCBs is open and free to download, the entire OS is buildable from source, and it comes with a variety of features that facilitate rapid prototyping."
More than enough reasons for me. I'd buy one in a heartbeat, if I weren't broke right now.
It would be interesting to see if you can use the Myriad option to swap it for a Ath9K, and use it as a WiFi card instead. I presume that the LM6002D is going to be wired to the shared FPGA. It'd be neat to have a 100% open firmware wireless card too.
The Novena laptop is a neat niche product, but I don't see it taking off, even in a future version. For almost any task one wishes to accomplish, it's better to build specialized hardware that interfaces with a standard laptop than to build a custom laptop. I think a peripheral would have sold better.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 42.5 ms ] threadCongratulations Bunnie and Xobs ;)
More than enough reasons for me. I'd buy one in a heartbeat, if I weren't broke right now.
They told me they have the full system running with zero binary-only blobs. I think that alone can be quite a selling point nowadays...