!libre_hardware
@lemmy.mlhttps://www.oshwa.org/2024/07/09/oshwa-needs-your-help/
OSHWA is in a pickle! In the US where our not for profit is registered there is a law stating that one third of all income must be from the public, while we have been extremely lucky to have receiv…
https://www.oshwa.org/2024/07/09/oshwa-needs-your-help/
OSHWA is in a pickle! In the US where our not for profit is registered there is a law stating that one third of all income must be from the public, while we have been extremely lucky to have receiv…
https://programming.dev/post/18593091
## A small, efficient laptop I am looking for a laptop which is as efficient as an android phone, small, fast, and cheap. I would prefer a stripped down Fedora Kinoite, but tbh ChromeOS is a masterpiece of efficient and secure OS design. Even on 4GB RAM it just works, boots in seconds, while still having encrypted storage. The issue is of course, that it is based on Google Chrome, and even Chromium is completely full of Google (use googerteller with e.g. Fedora Chromium and you see it pings Google all the time). — ## ARM Laptops with Linux support The new Snapdragon laptops are extremely impressive, and will have real Linux support in a short time. But they are damn expensive, and I am looking for something for light tasks, with the focus on: - being light and small (11in or so?) - being inexpensive - long battery life - very low standby battery use (like my GrapheneOS pixel, 1% over night) - reasonably big battery for use - okay specs for light tasks I watched a talk on getting Coreboot working on Chromebooks [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7HFIQi835wY] (ccc website [https://events.ccc.de/congress/2023/hub/event/turning_chromebooks_into_regular_laptops/]) and while elly also got Fedora working on an ARM Chromebook, that sounded like way above my skills. The x86 ones still have awesome batterylife (on ChromeOS), but using x86 in 2024 for an efficient machine… sounds like a waste of money. ## Docs for Linux on ARM Chromebooks? Neither chrultrabook nor mrchromebox touch ARM, at all. There are some small scripts and projects that do this, like this one [https://github.com/hexdump0815/linux-mainline-on-arm-chromebooks]. ## Bottlenecks Chromebooks have often nice chassis’ and displays, but kinda bad keyboards with missing keys. Also, too little RAM. Using Fedora with ZRAM in an aggressive mode (to compress all RAM) might be a workaround, but cause reasonable CPU overhead (it uses zstd for compression). And then, too little storage. I find this hard to discover, are there ARM / modern x86 Chromebooks with upgradeable NVME or at least eMMC? Using an SD card would be a workaround, which is btw. also not possible on Pixel Tablets (thanks Google). ## The Problems with Chromebooks Google uses a custom userspace, the boot (on ARM) is not really u-Boot anymore, they dont seem to test the mainline kernel and are slow with patches. Personally I think you can clearly see how they often just do the least amount of work possible to comply with the GPL. Like, visiting their code repo is already privacy invasive. Also a ton of firmware problems like broken audio, USB, sleep, input devices, which I couldn’t fix. ## Alternative: Pixel Tablet & GrapheneOS The good A Google Pixel Tablet would be an alternative. It runs GrapheneOS, which (I know) has awesome battery life and efficiency. GrapheneOS is also fully degoogled and runs all my FOSS apps, as well as having support for banking and stuff I might want. GrapheneOS is extremely secure while also being extremely stable (in both ways). I know that I can rely on my phone when I managed to break my Laptop again. The bad The Tablet is the first edition, a MVP pretty much. For drawing, a standards-compliant pencil can be used, but it has quite some latency and no palm rejection (video source [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_j5bpSRiUc]). It is also very expensive, considering that it has no SD card slot, and 128GB of storage go for 300+€ on the used market. There seem to be less people disappointed from it than I expected. — You see, I also dont really know what I want XD - a small appliance device, just for travelling and watching stuff there? - Should it have a keyboard? I hope a 5-pin one, no garbage bluetooth - Pen I think yes, as it is probably awesome for sketching things (I am tired of not being able to do that, and a drawing tablet is not portable) It may be that a Pixel tablet is actually better here. But a ton of good Linux software is simply missing on Android. Like, a PDF editor that does it’s job, Libreoffice, GIMP, Inkscape, a real Firefox (with addon support and sandboxing). There is some progress in virtualization [https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/google-now-pays-250-000-for-kvm-zero-day-vulnerabilities/], I might be able to use Termux with VNC to some extent, but it would suck for batterylife and probably also UX. — I guess a modern AMD or Intel Chromebook with supported, tested firmware, would be the best option for a compact, opensource, efficient laptop. Meanwhile a Pixel Tablet would work 100%, be possibly way more energy efficient than a normal Linux distro could ever be, also more secure, mostly never have broken software. I would like to test this though, tuned, stripped down KDE Plasma, power profiles, … but at the level of firmware issues, this could stop being fun. But, fun is relative, right? What do you do? Do you run ChromiumOS, or Linux on a Chromebook? Or do you use a Pixel Tablet as a Laptop replacement? Cheers!
You might recall that I was considering a MNT Reform laptop to replace my crappy HP laptop a few months ago.
Well, I got no answer or information of any kind anywhere (not just here on Lemmy), but the idea kept going round and round in the back of my head. And now, 5 months later, I find myself having to upgrade Mint to Wilma on my hateful HP laptop soon, and I already dread rebooting to the console because Xorg is dead again, having to downgrade to a working version of the kernel again, fighting the AMDGPU driver again, making the super-flaky and completely terrible wifi-cum-bluetooth Realtek 8821CE adapter work halfway decently again...
I hate this laptop. In fact, I hate it so much that I finally pulled the trigger on the MNT Reform laptop. Hopefully it'll get here before the need to upgrade becomes too pressing.
Stay tuned 🙂
https://yewtu.be/watch?v=vR6RX-zk7mQ
The Beijing institute of Open-Source Chip (BOSC), founded in 2021, develops strong ties with academia and industry. In addition to the successful development of industry’s open source and high-performance RISC-V CPU core XiangShan, a core mission of BOSC is to promote and contribute to the open-source chip ecosystem, covering not only design tools (such as agile development tools and open-source EDA tools), but also verification methodologies (such as open-source verification) and education (such as the One Student One Chip (OSOC) Initiative). This presentation will introduce 3-5 key contributions that BOSC has made or plans to make to the open-source chip ecosystem in terms of exploration, achievements and lessons learned. Details and slides: https://riscv-europe.org/summit/2024/conference#open-source-at-bosc-achievements-and-challenges-details
I have a terrible el-cheapo 14" HP laptop that I bought from a big-box store a few years ago as an emergency replacement for a laptop that died on me on the road while visiting a customer. I literally went to the store 5 minutes before it closed, bought any laptop they had, loaded Linux on it at the hotel and transferred my files from the dead laptop overnight, then did my presentation the next morning.
The trouble is, that laptop is VERY Linux unfriendly. I've put up with it for years because I don't like to throw things away, but I just can't stand the regular AMDGPU driver crashes and the broke-ass wifi-cum-bluetooth Realtek chipset anymore.
So I'm on the market for a good Linux laptop. I'm not a demanding user - I use that HP laptop to edit videos and do CAD and I'm okay with it - I'm very comfortable with anything Linux and I can code my way around problems.
I'm really tempted to get a MNT Reform laptop: I like the LiFePo4 battery cells a lot, it's solid, it's open hardware, it has a trackball and I love trackballs, it's highly hackable, and I'd like to support the MNT Research guys. And I'm old enough and the kids have been out of the house long enough that money is no object.
But a couple of things are holding me back. Maybe there are MNT Reform owners here who could shed some light on the following questions:
I don't know much of the ARM ecosystem, and what to expect from what processor / SoC. So I'm thinking of going with the highest end RK3588 32GB / 256GB CPU module offered by MNT. Would this at least match the performances of my stupid HP laptop's Ryzen 5 CPU in terms of real-world performances?
Or put another way: should I expect to take a hit when encoding my videos or doing big CAD models compared to this already slow laptop, or can I reasonably expect the MNT Reform to at least not be a regression.
Side question (yes, I know it should be obvious, but asking is better than guessing): I assume the "32GB / 256GB" in the CPU module's denomination is for 32GB of RAM and 256GB of onboard flash. Meaning I'd have that much disk space without needing to add a NVMe SSD card. Correct?
The keyboard layout looks all shades of terrible. I'm flexible with anything but not keyboard layouts - and especially those keyboard that don't put the left SHIFT and CTRL at the bottom where they belong, or have a split space bar.
The Reform's keyboard ticks all the wrong boxes for me in that respect: I can tell rightaway that it's going to fight my typing muscle memory all the time and forever, because I sure ain't gonna get used to it.
Can I remap the keys so I can at least I can swap CTRL and whatever that key is at the bottom left, and make the 3 buttons that replace the space bar act as a space bar? Then it's just a matter of putting a sticker on the keys and gluing the space bar keycaps together somehow.
I seem to recall some years ago that if the laptop was left off and unplugged for long enough - like 2 weeks IIRC - it would drain the cells and kill them because there was no under-voltage protection. Less dramatically but equally annoyingly, you couldn't leave it unplugged for a few days and expect to find it fully charged when you needed it most.
Does it still do that? Or has the hardware been fixed - or maybe there's a "Turn really off" option in the little side computer that runs the mini OLED display?
Mind you, I can always drill a hole and add a physical switch to disconnect the cells, but I'd rather not do that.
Well that's pretty much it. Sorry for the long post 🙂 There's precious little information about the MNT Reform out there - probably a good indication that there are precious few such machines in the wild, sadly - so I would welcome any real-world user feedback!
Hello folks. I'm wanting to learn a bit about computer hardware and firmware design, the ultimate goal will be a fully open-source hardware computer (I don't expect that any time soon). I'm familiar with PCB layout and design already as well as MCU and general programming.
Does anyone have suggestions for Off-the-Shelf CPUs that are supported well-enough by Linux and have useful documentation and datasheets available? I'm not looking for high performance, running a GUI, or anything like that. I'm literally just interested in practicing the board layout and figuring out how to extend core/libreboot to support it (out implement my own firmware) and get a terminal session.
https://www.eco-libre.org/2023-annual-report/
In 2023, we added 4 new open-source hardware projects to address community's human rights, including access to safe water, shelter, and sanitation
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4OyrboNvnM4
Ever wonder how a radically open-source company can be successful? Why do most companies live long enough to watch the hero become the villain? Sit back and ...
https://lemmy.ml/post/8990700