Ready to switch to first Open Hardware GNU/Linux PowerPC notebook & desktop

It's the right time to be protagonist and active to put together the first Open Hardware PowerPC Notebook & Desktop designed around GNU/Linux

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OSHW PowerPC Notebook Chassi + Motherboard

HowTo

Libre Hardware and Software are bricks of our societies and should be in our hands! We as community we have conceived, designed and realized the OSHW PowerPC Notebook motherboard prototypes. Now for getting the core computing platform stable and functional we need your participation.

Group Synergy

Open Hardware Community Driven. Improving and enriching human relations and collaboration among us permit our Community the conceive, design and produce prototypes of our Open Hardware motherboard. What we do is governed and possibile by our Community. New projects will be launched thanks to the arrival of new volunteers like you.

DIY Maker Mindset

We collaborate with volunteers to create the opportunity to experience hands-on learning, to inspire creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving trying to conceive, design and produce what we need or desire. We encourage this culture from primary schools to University and with no age limit.

Open Hardware Community Driven

Our open hardware projects are governed by our Community that is open. Our Community conceive, design and produce and where needed, thanks to donations, we pay engineers. We are quite slow because we solve problems thank to our passion, creativity and obstinacy.

Democratize Electronic design and production

We seek to encourage communities to acquire the skills and capabilities necessary to produce hardware and software independently and to have control over it. Therefore, we promote local and decentralized design and production.

The fundraising of the PowerPC Notebook reaches a 20% of its goal in six days

Posted on June 29, 2017 by Guillermo Amat

The fundraising of the PowerPc Notebook has reached a 20% of its goal in six days. This is a good starting point but we need you to spread our project to achieve our target.

Remember this campaign is trying to lead to a fully open source hardware. Releasing a complete laptop product as Open Source is an important step that people will forward across the globe. So this project is important to spread the open source philosophy. Do not miss this opportunity. Donate now!.

In another vein, we are tracking the campaign and following what people says in social networks. Some of you have expressed some concerns because there is no refund if the campaign fails. As we have explained in the FAQ of the campaign page, if we cannot reach the sum of 12600€ we will use the money to fund a similar project in the scope of the association (Power Progress Community) mission. As is stated in the statutes (ART 3):

“The Association promotes and disseminates software (especially open source software), and open hardware (with focus on, but not limited to, PowerPC and OpenPower architectures) with the aim of sharing knowledge and expertise.”

There are also discussions about the final specs of the machine. We cannot give all the details because is the objective of this stage to determine what components to include. So what we can do right now is to clarify that we want to have an MXM connector for the graphic card but we cannot guarantee that it will be finally included.

We are in the good way! Just remember that everything will start after we reach the 12600€ goal and we are very close to that. Do not hesitate to contact us to ask or comment whatever.

The PowerPC Notebook campaign has just started

Posted on June 23, 2017 by Guillermo Amat

We are very happy to announce that our funding campaign has just started. Starting today, we will accept donations through our campaign page with the objective of collecting funds to establish a contract with Acube Systems to design the PowerPC Notebook motherboard.

It has been a long way and we feel we are only starting. We wanted to reach this point many months ago but we found some difficulties and we tried to find solutions for all of them. In this time we have created our non profit association (Power Progress Community), we started a preliminary task for selecting hardware components, we have identified people to maintain a Linux distribution, we contacted companies and organizations and of course, we received you support in our website, in our facebook page, in the forum and other social networks.

The PowerPC Notebook campaign has just started

After all this work and solving all these issues we are ready to collect the money required to start the engineering process. In the end, it is not the intention of this blog entry to explain all the details here so, we invite you to find all the information in the campaign page: https://fundraising.powerpc-notebook.org/

Thank you very much for your support and enthusiasm.

Update regarding the crowdfunding

Posted on May 31, 2017 by Casper Steuperaert

Dear readers, members of the community

As you know, we last stated that it was our goal to begin the crowdfunding campaign in May. We have settled on the way in which we want to conduct our crowdfunding, which is a combination of recurring and non-recurring crowdfunding over time to fund the development of the laptop. We’re not aiming a campaign constricted in a short time as we felt that would not go well with self-hosting our crowdfunding. This manner of crowdfunding is comparable with Patreon donations or the manner in which organizations like Haiku Inc. are funded.

For us it is important to take a while to coordinate this with our manufacturer, to finalize an exhaustive text and to produce a video to explain the fundraising. Due to this we are delaying the start as we’re sorting this out at the moment. We need some more days to complete these tasks and to set up the online donation campaign.

A small delay is no delay

Our aim is launching the campaign sometime in June, but we will keep you updated as we make progress.

Our apologies for the delay, we thank you for your patience and stay tuned! 😀

First crowdfuding campaign to start in May

Posted on April 28, 2017 by Roberto Innocenti

We are happy to announce that we are finishing all the tasks required to launch our first crowdfunding campaign.

As you might know at this stage we will financing the electrical engineering and schematics of the motherboard. This work will be carried by ACube Systems if the campaign goal is achieved.

The campaign will be hosted in our current website and these days we are closing some requirements for the launch such as the WordPress plugin, text contents, videos and the secure payments integration through Paypal. We expect to have all ready during the second half of May.

Creative Commons: https://www.flickr.com/photos/planeta/8047889850

PowerPC Notebook Crowdfunding – electrical schematics

Posted on March 27, 2017 by Roberto Innocenti

The Power Progress Community ( the non profit organization that we have founded in July 2016) will launch a crowdfunding campaign to finance the analysis of the system architecture, components selection and electrical schematics for the PowerPC Notebook.

The decision has been taken after a voting process, inside our core team, celebrated the third week of March. The majority of the members voted to go ahead with the crowd funding as soon as possible.

This phase will be only the first step to achieve the whole design as the progress of selecting all the required components where taking too much time and energy from the project volunteers. If the funding objective is reached, this task will be done by ACube Systems in a timed boxed period.
Further details about this campaign will be published soon.