What edition do you have? I wanted to buy it, but the Braveheart edition was sold out for a long time. I just noticed the "Community Edition: UBports" is available though and might just buy it.
I did manage to get a Braveheart edition. Software is still very much a work in progress, but it's finally gotten to the point of being basically usable in my opinion, at least on my preferred postmarketOS (honestly, other options are probably more polished already; I just like pmOS because I prefer its design).
I have an original pinebook and it would be usable for light computing tasks (note taking/light programming in vim, web browsing with FF + no script) if not for the awkward keyboard layout. The other issue with the pinebook is the Mali 400 GPU is not open source, so if you are after a fully open device the pinebook is not it. IIRC there are also some video acceleration issues caused by the Mali 400 drivers.
The new pinebook pro looks like a better product, but I don't own one so I can't really comment.
You might indeed be interested in the Pinebook Pro. I recently ordered one, and it's supposed to ship later this month. There is active work on an open source GPU driver[1], and OpenBSD lists it as a supported device on their arm64 port[2]. I'm excited to get my hands on it and see what I can get to run on it, as well as potentially replace my current AMD64 laptop with it.
I have a Pinebook Pro. It is an interesting machine if you want an ARM notebook to play with, and certainly impressive for the price. The keyboard and trackpad fall short of what you'd want to use as a primary computer though. The trackpad is somewhat understandable since that is a common issue from a firmware and software perspective, but most other notebooks have decent keyboards.
I also agree that MNT looks philosophically interesting, but it also looks highly opinionated to the point that it is a challenging sell even for the niche audiences of people who want an open source laptop and/or an ARM laptop.
I find the trackpad actively bad. Though this is, apparently, due to the proprietary trackpad firmware not behaving correctly. There is some effort to reverse engineer it, mostly by this guy (as far as I know)
https://github.com/akirakyle/pinebook-pro-keyboard-updater/t...
I'm surprised you don't like the keyboard though, I found it to be shockingly good. I often write on it instead of some of my other keyboards. I'll add the disclaimer though: I like apple scissor switch keyboards, and dislike mechanical keyboards. So that colors my opinion.
This is very much a laptop that has not allowed perfect to be the enemy of good, and I'm glad it exists. And I'm glad I got one!
My main concern with this DIY laptop is if they are mainlining everything for Linux and U-boot. It looks to be entirely open source (due to the use of the NXP/Freescale i.MX8MQ and the work going into that).
This unfortunately happened with the Novena. It was entirely open source, but there were a lot of out of tree patches that had to be applied to get a kernel fully functional. This meant that it was effectively frozen at 4.4 without someone to dedicate a lot of time to port the changes to a newer kernel (I say that as someone who tried, and gave up, to try to port the changes to 4.9).
So this is a bit off-topic, but I pulled out my Novena this past weekend to work on an SDR project and after updating the installed packages I started wondering about the process of keeping these devices running up-to-date software and the community around it.
Are you able to offer any insight about how I, a developer with only a little embedded experience, could learn enough about the process to meaningfully contribute to keeping the Novena up-to-date? Is there still a community around the Novena?
I tried to document what I did as much as possible for others to look at it. I recall I was able to update it to Stretch (with linux 4.4, not linux 4.9) and I was able to make the whole boot process/update process more debian friendly.
u-boot-novena is where I put all of the scripts needed in order to get the whole process to work with Debian Mainline.
Also have most of the good bits of nuggets to figure it out too (that's how I figured out most of what I did). I don't know how much of a community around it there is anymore though (I really haven't looked in years).
EDIT: It looks like jookia actually did a lot of work and upgraded the Novena to Buster:
Thanks! I'm not sure how I overlooked the forums. It looks like there is someone there who has ported everything to Buster, so it looks like there is at least enough of a community to see some new software releases and hopefully offer some more pointers in how to contribute.
This is one reason that I tend to like things like the CutiePi (Pi-based tablet) that reuses an already-supported SoC/"motherboard"; I already expect the Pi to either be mainline or have enough support that any out-of-tree patches will be maintained.
It's already running an almost mainline kernel: https://twitter.com/mntmn/status/1259611758827835394
and what is left looks like it would be easy to get upstreamed. I don't know about the u-boot situation, but one can always ask Lukas on twitter ^^
I have a Novena around collecting dust too and used it a lot while it was still getting patches. I'm actually more excited about the reform2, and already held a prototype unit at 36C3. It's very much what got me excited about open hardware laptops in the first place, but packaged in a more user-centric way. the Novena was always a pita to use on the go.
I'm glad to hear it! If those are mainlined I would be a lot more excited about this.
I imagine it uses u-boot already, that doesn't seem as hard to port to a system and upstream (I got vanilla u-boot working on a Novena, but it did not have some of the patches that bunnie and xobs put to it).
i am an owner of a purism and this seems great if only to push forward full openness down to the hardware/schematics level. i also like the trackball.
but... that enclosure looks kind of thick and blocky for a heavy travel setup. it also weighs about .5 kg more than a librem v4; that's non-trivial. it's nice that it's passively cooled, but i'm just having trouble seeing myself working with that laptop as i would others, for some reason.
The idea looks exciting, but the details are less so.
In particular, I have a hard time believing the CPU (4x1.5GHZ A53) and memory (4GB RAM, non-upgradeable) will be sufficient for a lot of the more interesting uses.
Combine that with the thickness. This thing is chonky...4cm / 1.575in thick. I get that compromises are needed in favor of openness, but this is a lot of concessions.
The linked page says the memory is part of the SOM chip which to me implies it's not upgradable. Though the i.MX8 reference website does appear to support external devices for memory, so you may be able to upgrade it, by attaching another device to the board (but that's unclear to me)
Maybe you missed it, its right there on the first page - " and the system has no "management engine" or other remote control features that could be used to attack you"
1k USD vs 1.1k vs 1.4k vs 1.43k - says the comparison table near the end. Since they are in the same ballpark I want to know the numbers for benchmarks as well. If they are in the same ballpark then this is worth buying, otherwise I don't value my privacy just for the sake of it and lose instead 100% performance. So, any links to benchmarks as well?
Any chance of a keyboard option where the left control (at caps-lock position) and the shift keys are full (or fuller) size? In principle I like the economic layout very much, but I fear splitting these keys would hamper normal typing (for me). Perhaps you could offer combining caps, so the splitting becomes optional, if that would work.
32 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 61.3 ms ] threadThe new pinebook pro looks like a better product, but I don't own one so I can't really comment.
[1] https://xdc2018.x.org/slides/Panfrost-XDC_2018.pdf
[2] https://www.openbsd.org/arm64.html
I also agree that MNT looks philosophically interesting, but it also looks highly opinionated to the point that it is a challenging sell even for the niche audiences of people who want an open source laptop and/or an ARM laptop.
(and there's also a bounty apparently! https://www.bountysource.com/issues/88375235-reverse-enginee...)
I'm surprised you don't like the keyboard though, I found it to be shockingly good. I often write on it instead of some of my other keyboards. I'll add the disclaimer though: I like apple scissor switch keyboards, and dislike mechanical keyboards. So that colors my opinion.
This is very much a laptop that has not allowed perfect to be the enemy of good, and I'm glad it exists. And I'm glad I got one!
This unfortunately happened with the Novena. It was entirely open source, but there were a lot of out of tree patches that had to be applied to get a kernel fully functional. This meant that it was effectively frozen at 4.4 without someone to dedicate a lot of time to port the changes to a newer kernel (I say that as someone who tried, and gave up, to try to port the changes to 4.9).
Are you able to offer any insight about how I, a developer with only a little embedded experience, could learn enough about the process to meaningfully contribute to keeping the Novena up-to-date? Is there still a community around the Novena?
https://github.com/chris4795
I tried to document what I did as much as possible for others to look at it. I recall I was able to update it to Stretch (with linux 4.4, not linux 4.9) and I was able to make the whole boot process/update process more debian friendly.
u-boot-novena is where I put all of the scripts needed in order to get the whole process to work with Debian Mainline.
The forums:
https://kosagi.com/forums/
Also have most of the good bits of nuggets to figure it out too (that's how I figured out most of what I did). I don't know how much of a community around it there is anymore though (I really haven't looked in years).
EDIT: It looks like jookia actually did a lot of work and upgraded the Novena to Buster:
https://www.kosagi.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=542
I may try it sometime.
I have a Novena around collecting dust too and used it a lot while it was still getting patches. I'm actually more excited about the reform2, and already held a prototype unit at 36C3. It's very much what got me excited about open hardware laptops in the first place, but packaged in a more user-centric way. the Novena was always a pita to use on the go.
I imagine it uses u-boot already, that doesn't seem as hard to port to a system and upstream (I got vanilla u-boot working on a Novena, but it did not have some of the patches that bunnie and xobs put to it).
but... that enclosure looks kind of thick and blocky for a heavy travel setup. it also weighs about .5 kg more than a librem v4; that's non-trivial. it's nice that it's passively cooled, but i'm just having trouble seeing myself working with that laptop as i would others, for some reason.
In particular, I have a hard time believing the CPU (4x1.5GHZ A53) and memory (4GB RAM, non-upgradeable) will be sufficient for a lot of the more interesting uses.
That way you get as good (or bad) of setup as you can afford rather adding the price to every laptop