231–240 of 250 posts
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I do agree. You can get used X and T series Thinkpads for a couple hundred dollars. They will outlive most cheap new laptops.
If you get a good one. I've been burned so many times now by people selling something they know has problems. They often don't manifest during the "test drive." It sucks.
It reminds me of the Commodore 64 that it was underpowered but sold cheaper than the other computers. I got a 99 dollar used Dell 64 but dual core system with Windows 10 on it upgraded from Windows 7. Runs quite well, but it is not a gaming machine.
The Commie64 didn't really have competition in its market space, which is a big reason why it was able to sell so well despite being kind of crappy. This laptop is competing against Chromebooks, Netbooks, old but still functional laptops, etc...
If Commodore got the C65 to work it would have cost less to make than the C64.
So now there is a remake called the Mega65
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im a huge fan of your work. may i ask if a IMX8M version will be available in the future ?
Hi, thanks! Not to trigger the Osborne effect, but yes, this is a plan. And/or RISC-V. But we need to get the ball rolling. I will give a discount or upgrade option for people who get the i.MX6 version now.
Did you see anything similar?
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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…
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Assuming the same height/width proportions, it would have (11/7)^2 = 2.47 times the area. Quite a bit bigger.
11" is bigger than 7" for sure, but that's not my point. My point is that 11" is at the upper end of what I'd consider a netbook, and it wasn't immediately obvious to me when I browsed the page that there was an 11" model so I thought you might have missed it, too.
I'm not sure of the proper definition, but I'm using it to mean something smaller and less powerful than a laptop - a kind of "sub-laptop" category.
What definition are you working with?
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…
The bootlin group is a awesome collection of embedded linux engineers and they are well known if not one the top of the lines engineers for the Linux-Sunxi community.
Honest question. Why don't people buy old laptops instead of cheaper new ones? I'm no expert but the cost to performance ratio isn't to far off. I am typing this on T420 Thinkpad laptop. I get desiring to use open hardware but at the detriment of performance doesn't quite make sense.
I'd second this having just tried this yesterday. I picked up a Thinkpad X230 for £150. Battery test (looped windowed youtube video running over wi-fi) lasted 3 hours, so that's fine and the laptop itself all seems to work as expected.
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> 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/ As mentioned in that review, the software part seems to be a problem area for Pine. That could also be why it's cheap (because it's mainly the hardware alone that one is paying for). I got the original Pine64 board through the crowdfundi…
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.
[1]: http://wiki.pine64.org/index.php/Pine_A64_Software_Release
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> 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/ As mentioned in that review, the software part seems to be a problem area for Pine. That could also be why it's cheap (because it's mainly the hardware alone that one is paying for). I got the original Pine64 board through the crowdfundi…
FreeBSD makes images available for it that you burn to the SD card and pop in and you are off to the races, although just for -HEAD so you end up chasing new images every so often since the system is still heavily in flux.
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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.
That's good news. Could you please point me to where these updated images are? I had been looking at the official site [1] once every few months last year, but didn't find the Ubuntu (or Debian) images updated. The dates are still from end of 2016. [1]: http://wiki.pine64.org/index.php/Pine_A64_Software_Release
I'd recommend the Xenial images. There are Mate/i3wm versions for the pinebook, but all the others (Pine64 & Sopine) are headless and require the installation of a GUI.