how to build a treacherous-computing-supporter-free computer?

Hmm, you can get mini-itx motherboards from... VIA, MSI maybe others.

I think the graphics card could also come from VIA

RAM wise Kingston Tech and a few others.

I don't know about Hard Drives - both Maxtor and Western Digital are on that list.

dylunio

Damn, that's alot of companies there on that list. It's almost the whole hardware world.

I doubt however that all of them will make DRMed hardware. Most of the companies on that list are merely listed as "contributors" which can mean alot of things which doesn't necessarily include making their own TC hardware. Many of them are probably there because they percieve it as a "trend" that they mustn't be left out of. There is a possibility that some of them will at some point learn about the disadvantages of TC and DRM and drop their support (being also removed from that list).

For example, just because Seagate is on the list of contributors there doesn't mean they'll be making TCd hard drives anytime soon.

I hope I'm right. :-)

As for making a computer without parts of any of the listed companies it would be hard, but probably doable. However, it would be hard to expect a very high-end system of that... It seems alot of the basic stuff would depend on VIA (starting from a processor) - heh, VIA might recognize a chance here. :-)

Well, depending on what you want to use your computer for, you could build a ultra-high-end system simply by clustering a lot of VIA boxes... hey, they're reasonably priced and power-efficient, so why not?

A bunch of clustered iGrills comes to mind - though I don't think all it's components are TC free.

It would be interesting to see how far you could go with a via cluster computer.

dylunio

In the future, OGP for graphics card. I'm on the mailing list, and it comes very frequently, so they're making progress. There's also talks of making more free hardware.

Indeed a_thing the OGP is an interesting and worthy project, it'll be intersting to see where the money to build the chips comes from.

dylunio

About the clustering - using LinuxBIOS seems like a good idea, it makes the nodes boot in seconds which makes "manual power management" possible (need more power? just switch on a few more nodes).
Anyhow, this only makes sense if your work can easily be distributed (3d rendering, distcc, distmp3...).

Actually, LinuxBIOS seems like a good idea in general.