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A comment on Richard Stallman – The state of the Free Software movement. Parent comment

Re:Richard Stallman – The state of the Free Software movement by assttoasstmgr on Monday April 18, 2022 @01:32AM (#31067742)
There were a large number of Intel Atom tablets and laptops manufactured less than a decade ago that were hobbled with I think a 32-bit UEFI which could only boot a 32-bit OS. I own two of these devices myself so they are not uncommon.
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Re:Richard Stallman – The state of the Free Software movement by blendergeek on Monday April 18, 2022 @01:59AM (#31067864)
The 32 bit UEFI actually could be used to boot a 64 bit OS image. Well, you could make it work.

Source: https://liliputing.com/2015/07/install-ubuntu-14-04-lts-on-t...

A friend of mine had one of those laptops and I wanted to install Linux on it. It took me a few weeks for other reasons (those M.2 drives were the worst), but thanks to the work of Ian Morrison, it was possible.

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Re:Richard Stallman – The state of the Free Software movement by tehbeard on Monday April 18, 2022 @01:39AM (#31067776)
I had such a system to hand (my brother's old netbook).

Turns out a bios flash can in some cases enable the 64bit functionality.

Its not a particularly fast system though...

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Re:Richard Stallman – The state of the Free Software movement by lynguist on Monday April 18, 2022 @06:53AM (#31069218)
The deal with these devices is they have the compute power of a Pentium III from 1999 or a Raspberry Pi 2 from 2015.

It’s enough for an embedded system, but vastly underpowered for desktop computing or web browsing.

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