Blog: Librem 13 FreeBSD Port by Eric McCorkle

This blog post by user Eric McCorkle shows us how he got FreeBSD set up on his Librem notebook. He explains what was successful and what things a user should look out for. Librem is described as a laptop that fully respects your right to free and open source software.

When the Librem laptops were announced last year, I was quite excited and I ordered both the 15 and 13-inch models. My 13-inch model arrived last week, and I have begun the process of porting FreeBSD to it.

I have to say, I am very excited to finally have a laptop from a fully-cooperative manufacturer, where I can get my hands on all the hardware specs and possibly even upstream fixes. This is a very welcome boon after a decade of having to deal with flaky BIOS issues, black-box hardware, and other difficulties.

The first thing I do when I get a new laptop is poke around in the BIOS menu (no photos yet). The librem has a coreboot port, but I decided to get FreeBSD installed and check the system out a bit before diving into the art of flashing my BIOS, so I was looking at the proprietary American Megatrends BIOS menu. Even still, I was pleased by the features it presented, most notably the ability to set up custom signing keys. I am going to have to do some work on a signed FreeBSD boot and loader chain.