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Pinebook: An Affordable 64-bit ARM based Open Source Notebook

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Re: Pinebook: An Affordable 64-bit ARM based Open Source Notebook

#211

Post by dragontamer »

inetsee wrote: post #172
tacoman wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've tried rebuilding the battery for an x220 twice and both times the battery case ended up too damaged to be used. I'm about to fork over $100+ for my forth battery for this machine.

I am confused. I have a Thinkpad X220 I bought used. The original battery is still usable for my purposes. (I don't use it for travel so I haven't tried using it for more than a few hours at a time.) I just looked on Ebay and the most expensive batteries listed for the X220 are less than $50, with some less than $20. Am I missing something?

As a rule of thumb, any laptop battery for less than $50 is recycled crap.

There are companies who mix-and-match recycled cells and combine them into Ebay batteries out there. Beyond the explosion risk innate to Li-Ion, you're going to get bad battery life with these recycled cells in the very best case.

The cheapest "legitimate" laptop batteries I've found come in the ~$80 mark.

-------------

A good and proper 18650 cell costs $7.50 alone, and you'll need six of them to build a laptop battery.

https://www.amazon.com/Samsung-INR18650-25R-Rechargeable-Bat...

That's $45 for 6x proper cells straight from the manufacturer. Plus labor, plus all the other parts of the laptop battery (chassis, protection circuit, etc. etc.). Anyone selling for less than $50 is straight up recycled mix-and-match junk. Its the only way you get to $20.

And before you go look up cheaper cells: Ultrafire cells are recycled junk. So ignore all of those listings. Its best to stick with Panasonic / Samsung / other name brands.

Re: Pinebook: An Affordable 64-bit ARM based Open Source Notebook

#212

Post by guidoism »

jandrese wrote: post #185
unlimitedbacon wrote: post #88

I have this laptop. The beauty of it is that it is unashamedly bad. It is the humblest of laptops. The body is a direct copy of the 13" MacBook Air. As a computer, it is at least as usable as a Raspberry Pi. The teardown photos are hilarious because the motherboard only takes up about 1/6 the internal space. The rest is empty. https://hackaday.com/2017/04/28/hands-on-with-the-pinebook/ It comes with Ubuntu 16.04, but…

It has one of those goddamned AllWinner chips in it, I wouldn't hold my breath on the HDMI or any of the GPU acceleration working in the foreseeable future. Hardware drivers is not their business, nor is releasing docs that might allow someone else to write a driver. I have a dev board with one of those chips and getting any of the peripheral hardware working turned out to be a complete nightmare. I eventually gave u…

Looking at the pics there looks like enough space to be able to experiment with other dev boards. I wonder if we can just think of it as a case. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Re: Pinebook: An Affordable 64-bit ARM based Open Source Notebook

#213

Post by lphnull »

gkya wrote: post #210
lphnull wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well said. :) Personally, I don't think laptops like the Pinebook should ever be used by the masses because, like you said, building your own OS from scratch is difficult, even for the tech savvy! And no I'm not talking about compiling your own Gentoo yourself. What I mean is just starting with a barebones distro with NOTHING installed, then sudo apt-get intsall your carefully selected list of packages- followed by t…

Do you reckon a recent RPi is good enough for Emacsing away, with the occasional PDF-reading and watching videos w/ mpv? I think having a desktop computer with a wider monitor would be a nice improvement for me, given using a laptop for long times is not really ergonomical. If I can have a decent enough desktop experience with such a setup, that'd be very nice.

Emacs? yes. Terminal work is enjoyable on the pi.

PDF? PDFs and the web will be laggy unless you set up a compositor like Compton to speed things up. There's enough GPU power in the PI to set up decent 2d compositing with transparencies.

Videos? I wouldn't count on it because youtube videos are still choppy for me. Even after a ton of work, I still get light choppiness on 320p video. I haven't tried local video files yet, though I assume local files might perform better than web videos. I mean, gifs and webms play smoothly without choppiness, so why not mpv video?

One of the biggest flaws in the raspberry pi is the USB Micro port. If your USB micro cable is broken and unreliable, then your PI will get extremely slow and may even crash a lot due to the flickering power supply. Your pi won't tell you what's wrong either, which makes troubleshooting a pain until you figure out that the lightning bolt icon on your screen means power problem.

If you like linux and tinkering, I would highly recommend you get a pi. Just don't expect a pi to work out of the box. Most distros are so bloated and the pi is so limited, that you have to trim everything down for the pi to be even remotely enjoyable.

If you wish to send me a download link to an example video file of yours, I can play it on my setup for you and let you know how well the video performs.

Re: Pinebook: An Affordable 64-bit ARM based Open Source Notebook

#214

Post by znpy »

gkya wrote: post #207
tomxor wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, just _not_ using a massive DE goes most of the way for improving performance, especially on little devices like this. i3wm is great for this because it's a tiling window manager for both the masses and for the expert. Also once you are using i3 then using Debian instead of Ubuntu makes little difference to the user while going a fair way to removing a lot of bloat. However suggesting linux from scratch is a bit…

I recently switched to Gnome 3 (5th of march, tells me mercurial), and it just crawled my laptop, w/ 4G mem and i3 cpu @ 1.80 GHz. That's not super fast, but it freezing with merely Firefox and Emacs running was unacceptable. I tended to blame that on Firefox, but when I switched to Qutebrowser I understood that it was not it, and decided to see what was the cause. I saw that my fairly minimal Gnome 3 DE (i.e. the se…

Gnome 3 is really really bad. It is so bad that it actually makes me want to use Windows 10 instead.

Context: i've been using Xfce4 for the last 4-5 years and recently had to use Gnome3.x because of RHEL. Since I've a recent Gnome, I decided to also try a recent KDE.

Well...

- XFCE manages to be consistently fast and overall a joy to use

- KDE is getting usable again after the KDE4.0 mess. Still too much gummy by default, but it's so customizable that you can turn off most of the trash that is enabled by default.

- Gnome really looks like it has been designed for and tested against mentally challenged people. It's infuriating, most of its utilities lack menus and basic options/settings, to the point where having a GUI is more of an impediment rathen than being something useful.

I am very worried by the fact that Ubuntu is reverting back to Gnome.

Re: Pinebook: An Affordable 64-bit ARM based Open Source Notebook

#215

Post by blacksmith_tb »

gkya wrote: post #210
lphnull wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well said. :) Personally, I don't think laptops like the Pinebook should ever be used by the masses because, like you said, building your own OS from scratch is difficult, even for the tech savvy! And no I'm not talking about compiling your own Gentoo yourself. What I mean is just starting with a barebones distro with NOTHING installed, then sudo apt-get intsall your carefully selected list of packages- followed by t…

Do you reckon a recent RPi is good enough for Emacsing away, with the occasional PDF-reading and watching videos w/ mpv? I think having a desktop computer with a wider monitor would be a nice improvement for me, given using a laptop for long times is not really ergonomical. If I can have a decent enough desktop experience with such a setup, that'd be very nice.

I find Pi64[1] to be a decent improvement over Ubuntu on the RPi 3 (haven't tried it on one of the shiny new ones, though).

1: https://github.com/bamarni/pi64

Re: Pinebook: An Affordable 64-bit ARM based Open Source Notebook

#216

Post by prophesi »

lphnull wrote: post #192
prophesi wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Ubuntu image has been actively maintained for a while now. Though now the maintainer is putting more effort towards Android 7.1. Which is the crux of the issue... These distros are usually maintained by just one community developer.

serious question: why do people insist on using Ubuntu for low-end hardware like this and the PI??? Ubuntu is a cluttered nightmare full of so much unecessary stuff. Why not use a minimalistic non-GUI barebones version of Debian and build your OS up from there?

I agree. I'm a fan of headless Debian, and running i3wm when needed. (I currently run headless Ubuntu, but only because Debian on the Pine is no longer maintained)

If you need multimedia and heavy web browsing, run Android. That's what it was designed for.

Re: Pinebook: An Affordable 64-bit ARM based Open Source Notebook

#217

Post by gkya »

lphnull wrote: post #213
gkya wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you reckon a recent RPi is good enough for Emacsing away, with the occasional PDF-reading and watching videos w/ mpv? I think having a desktop computer with a wider monitor would be a nice improvement for me, given using a laptop for long times is not really ergonomical. If I can have a decent enough desktop experience with such a setup, that'd be very nice.

Emacs? yes. Terminal work is enjoyable on the pi. PDF? PDFs and the web will be laggy unless you set up a compositor like Compton to speed things up. There's enough GPU power in the PI to set up decent 2d compositing with transparencies. Videos? I wouldn't count on it because youtube videos are still choppy for me. Even after a ton of work, I still get light choppiness on 320p video. I haven't tried local video files…

Thanks a lot! I'm quite comfortable with Gnu/Linux and FreeBSD, and I do have a Pi, though it sits there on the shelf running a couple cron jobs and being a CUPS server. I've never tried it for desktop computing tho (I don't think I've ever used it unless through ssh). I'll definitely test it out when I have a monitor handy (I'll either use a Pi or connect the monitor to my laptop, I really need a screen at my eye level, I'm fed up with the neck aches because I was too caught up with reading a paper, or more often, fiddling with my emacs config).

WRT PDFs and web, I use qutebrowser w/o JS, which is lightweight, and most PDFs are just papers with nothing fancy (I'm a humanities student / prospective researcher). I can take the choppyness if it's not unusable.

The videos are just any video on Youtube. Mpv is a program similar to mplayer, and I use it to watch any video on the disk or use it like "mpv " to view videos from youtube (it even has titles and can show progress, really nice), I guess you mistook it for a video format.

Re: Pinebook: An Affordable 64-bit ARM based Open Source Notebook

#218

Post by gkya »

blacksmith_tb wrote: post #215
gkya wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you reckon a recent RPi is good enough for Emacsing away, with the occasional PDF-reading and watching videos w/ mpv? I think having a desktop computer with a wider monitor would be a nice improvement for me, given using a laptop for long times is not really ergonomical. If I can have a decent enough desktop experience with such a setup, that'd be very nice.

I find Pi64[1] to be a decent improvement over Ubuntu on the RPi 3 (haven't tried it on one of the shiny new ones, though). 1: https://github.com/bamarni/pi64

Thanks. I'd probably put FreeBSD on it though. I can't use it because I can't get suspend and resume working on laptops, but I miss it like Odysseus misses Ithaka. One of the few software I actually love, it is...

Re: Pinebook: An Affordable 64-bit ARM based Open Source Notebook

#219

Post by gkya »

znpy wrote: post #214
gkya wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently switched to Gnome 3 (5th of march, tells me mercurial), and it just crawled my laptop, w/ 4G mem and i3 cpu @ 1.80 GHz. That's not super fast, but it freezing with merely Firefox and Emacs running was unacceptable. I tended to blame that on Firefox, but when I switched to Qutebrowser I understood that it was not it, and decided to see what was the cause. I saw that my fairly minimal Gnome 3 DE (i.e. the se…

Gnome 3 is really really bad. It is so bad that it actually makes me want to use Windows 10 instead. Context: i've been using Xfce4 for the last 4-5 years and recently had to use Gnome3.x because of RHEL. Since I've a recent Gnome, I decided to also try a recent KDE. Well... - XFCE manages to be consistently fast and overall a joy to use - KDE is getting usable again after the KDE4.0 mess. Still too much gummy by def…

I wanted to use it [edit: i.e. Gnome] in order to slim down my heavy configuration. But just not worth it. All I do is use two GUI programs, and it managed to get in the way. XFCE gets bonus points for its configuration being in plain text and version controllable. I had to have this for Gnome: https://github.com/cadadr/configuration/blob/master/scripts/... https://github.com/cadadr/configuration/blob/master/xdg-conf...

Re: Pinebook: An Affordable 64-bit ARM based Open Source Notebook

#220

Post by jgtrosh »

lphnull wrote: post #205
tomxor wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, just _not_ using a massive DE goes most of the way for improving performance, especially on little devices like this. i3wm is great for this because it's a tiling window manager for both the masses and for the expert. Also once you are using i3 then using Debian instead of Ubuntu makes little difference to the user while going a fair way to removing a lot of bloat. However suggesting linux from scratch is a bit…

Well said. :) Personally, I don't think laptops like the Pinebook should ever be used by the masses because, like you said, building your own OS from scratch is difficult, even for the tech savvy! And no I'm not talking about compiling your own Gentoo yourself. What I mean is just starting with a barebones distro with NOTHING installed, then sudo apt-get intsall your carefully selected list of packages- followed by t…

“a barbones distro” ≠ “nothing installed”

Maybe you mean nothing more than what comes with the distro's install? In that case a clean Ubuntu counts? I think you should rethink what you have in mind; maybe you mean a distribution with few default packages and minimal preconfigured settings? Something like Arch?

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