Which phone should I buy for running Replicant?

[Dr. H. Nikolaus Schaller]

Am 26.09.2013 um 10:48 schrieb Nick:

> Quoth Dmitriy Nikandrov:
>> Good example is b43 driver
>> http://wireless.kernel.org/en/users/Drivers/b43 - it doesn't work
>> without proprietary firmware.

Yes, unfortunately:

"The Broadcom wireless chip needs proprietary software (called "firmware") that runs on the wireless chip itself to work properly. This firmware is copyrighted by Broadcom and must be extracted from Broadcom's proprietary drivers. "

I.e. the b43 driver is just about the kernel driver for the communication with the chip.
This part of interfacing a WiFi Chip is usually open because it uses a standard SPI or MMC/SDIO interface.

The same is for the Marvell chip used inside the GTA04. The SDIO driver (libertas) is GPL and part of kernel.org for a long time.

The binard firmware is e.g. provided by Debian provided it in their nonfree repository, so it is no problem to install/reinstall/redistribute it:

http://packages.debian.org/squeeze-backports/firmware-libertas

> 
> There is the OpenFWWF project, though that doesn't seem to be 
> focussed on supporting many models, it looks like it can effectively 
> drive the older BCM4xxx chips well enough. Updating the code to work 
> on newer chips like the BCM4329 might be a (relatively) easy way to 
> sort the firmware problem out for many newish phones, but it 
> certainly isn't an area I have enough knowledge or skill to do more 
> than talk about.

Oh, that OpenFWWF is an interesting project but hte last release is
from 2009.

For the GTA04 there was a similar initiative but it did not find interest:

http://projects.goldelico.com/p/gta04-main/issues/310/ (approach 1)

-- hns