Comments on: Bunnie Huang is building a laptop

By: milovoo

milovoo — Tue, 18 Dec 2012 14:50:00 +0000

“lengthy” in people-time not CPU-time. It requires the command-line and multiple restarts. Maybe there is an easier way but I haven’t found it yet. I had to figure it out just to install Arduino drivers.

By: Robert Holmén

Robert Holmén — Tue, 18 Dec 2012 02:34:00 +0000

This is going to be such a power hog that I expect he’s going to have to plug it in at which point the laptop advantage is mostly gone.

By: Robert Holmén

Robert Holmén — Tue, 18 Dec 2012 02:32:00 +0000

When you say “lengthy” are you talking about a lot of clock cycles? 1000 instead of 100?

By: milovoo

milovoo — Mon, 17 Dec 2012 21:21:00 +0000

Installing unsigned drivers on non-ARM Windows 8 requires a fairly lengthy process of temporarily disabling the “Driver Signature Enforcement”. Maybe it’s not “asking for permission” but they have certainly made it difficult.

By: onereader

onereader — Mon, 17 Dec 2012 19:06:00 +0000

Maybe I didn’t explain myself: of course the Freescale i.MX6 is a CPU but you can’t do a lot with a CPU by itself, you need all the rest, and “all the rest” when you look at ARM boards is all but open. Including the ARM laptops and tablets you can buy.

By: Taniwha

Taniwha — Mon, 17 Dec 2012 17:17:00 +0000

The iMX6 is a chip, it only gets a Windows RT bootloader or binary blobs if you choose to build them into whatever you’re building – the whole point about open source hardware and software is that you get to choose that stuff for yourself

By: mccrum

mccrum — Mon, 17 Dec 2012 15:57:00 +0000

I had thought the “1″ I used in the punctuation area was sufficient. Alas!

By: jandrese

jandrese — Mon, 17 Dec 2012 15:50:00 +0000

I’m not sure. I have a desktop replacement laptop (Latitude E6510) and the battery is still a substantial fraction of the weight of the laptop. If I pull the battery out, the machine is almost disconcertingly light for how bulky it is.

By: awjt

awjt — Mon, 17 Dec 2012 12:37:00 +0000

The only thing I don’t like about this board is the non-replaceable processor (and the rest of the hardware only for it). Basically, the nonuniversal design. BUT, Otherwise, these things are great. I just got a raspberry and it’s awesome. There is no reason people shouldnt learn Linux/unix. When you’ve got unix under your belt, the computer becomes less about the OS holy wars and more about what you can DO with it. Mine is becoming a CNC controller after I’m done goofing around with it.

By: onereader

onereader — Mon, 17 Dec 2012 09:04:00 +0000

Full of blobs, with binary drivers working only with the software they ship with, often no support and without the source code the manufacturer should offer, don’t even think about asking full hardware specifications. And if they come with Windows RT the bootloader is encrypted and it’s not possible to load a different OS.

By: onereader

onereader — Mon, 17 Dec 2012 09:04:00 +0000

By: nixiebunny

nixiebunny — Mon, 17 Dec 2012 04:54:00 +0000

This is a prototype board, which means that its form factor is extra-large for testing, not compressed for fitting into a laptop case.

Expect the final laptop design to be dramatically different in size and shape.

By: Brian Easton

Brian Easton — Mon, 17 Dec 2012 03:28:00 +0000

Windows RT is not Windows 8.

By: beforewepost

beforewepost — Mon, 17 Dec 2012 03:18:00 +0000

From arstechnica.com:
> On ARM Windows 8 systems, Microsoft’s certification rules prohibit entering “custom mode”—users must not be able to add certificates of their own—and prohibit disabling secure boot completely. The ARM systems will all require the use of a signed operating system loader, and that operating system loader must be signed by Microsoft.

By: Georg Curnutt

Georg Curnutt — Mon, 17 Dec 2012 03:01:00 +0000

Put me on the list! I still have my left kidney up for sale and would swap it for one of these in a heart beat (heart already taken)!

By: Brian Easton

Brian Easton — Mon, 17 Dec 2012 02:47:00 +0000

“New Windows 8 machines are now locked down to the point that you must have Microsoft’s permission to install non-Microsoft software.”

Keep drinking that Kool-Aid.

By: Andrew Singleton

Andrew Singleton — Mon, 17 Dec 2012 01:30:00 +0000

I suspect sarcasm tags are needed for the original poster.

By: TimRowledge

TimRowledge — Mon, 17 Dec 2012 00:22:00 +0000

Take a look on armdevices.net – lots and lots of arm powered laptops and tablets etc. some very, very, cheap, like $70.

By: Taniwha

Taniwha — Mon, 17 Dec 2012 00:13:00 +0000

Not easily buy? Mouser lists 60 in stock – I could have one in 2 days if I wanted

By: beforewepost

beforewepost — Sun, 16 Dec 2012 23:40:00 +0000

New Windows 8 machines are now locked down to the point that you must have Microsoft’s permission to install non-Microsoft software. That includes the OS iPhones you have to hack to install non-Apple approved software. Macintosh is headed down that path. Part of the intent is to mollify Hollywood’s desire to own every path to your eyes – part is to drive up revenue to Apple and Microsoft.

What you’ll get is the freedom to choose what software runs on your computer without having to ask for permission.

By: bcsizemo

bcsizemo — Sun, 16 Dec 2012 22:36:00 +0000

Well it really depends on what you want in the laptop. For your ultra thins, then yes, the battery probably comprises half of the total weight. For one that is more heavily oriented toward work or graphics (say 17″ with an optical drive) the battery weight is probably a quarter or less the weight of the total. Battery weight is fairly stable among laptops.

By: onereader

onereader — Sun, 16 Dec 2012 21:09:00 +0000

There are single-board ARM computers a lot more powerful than a Raspberry: TI’s Pandaboard, ST Ericsson Snowball, Samsung-based ODROID-X and ODROID-X2, and a few others I can’t remember now. This board has a few nice things you don’t usually find on ASoCs who are more or less glorified smartphone components: more networking (most of the boards come with a single USB FastEthernet, if they have it at all), upgradeable RAM, SATA…

EDIT: this was supposed to be a reply to http://boingboing.net/2012/12/15/bunnie-huang-is-building-a-lap.html#comment-739281805

By: caseyd

caseyd — Sun, 16 Dec 2012 21:04:00 +0000

exactly. I see this as a souped up BeagleBoard MXy mix.

By: caseyd

caseyd — Sun, 16 Dec 2012 21:03:00 +0000

Racking them up for automation.
some people spend too much time in Starbucks.

By: SedanChair

SedanChair — Sun, 16 Dec 2012 20:59:00 +0000

Who made the components?

Who made your willful misinterpretation? I want to buy direct from the source

By: SamSam

SamSam — Sun, 16 Dec 2012 20:58:00 +0000

Sounds like things have changed some since 2004 then. The MacBook Air is 1080g, and its battery is 450g. So the laptop weight has gone down quite a lot (they’re packing more power into 630 non-battery grams than yours has in 1050 grams), but they’ve made up for it by considerably upping the weight of the battery (the MacBook Air lasts 5 hours while on continuous WiFi).

Still, 40% isn’t “almost all,” it’s true.

By: onereader

onereader — Sun, 16 Dec 2012 20:58:00 +0000

Look better: i.MX6, it’s a Freescale ARM CPU. This isn’t something you can easily buy, there’re not a lot of ARM laptops and the cheaper ones are full of closed source blobs and very hard to get fully working with a standard Linux distro (as opposed to whatever the Chinese manufacturer ships, often without complying to the GPL requirements).

By: PrettyBoyTim

PrettyBoyTim — Sun, 16 Dec 2012 20:54:00 +0000

I like the look of this – although it’s being pushed as an Open Source laptop, it seems to me more like a single-board computer that has been designed so that you *could* use it as a laptop, but actually fills a niche quite close to the one currently taken by Mini-ITX computers.

Arduino —> Raspberry Pi —> This thing —> Mini-ITX —> PC Desktop

All of the above can be used for interesting hardware projects, but their CPU power (and size) increase the further you go to the right.

By: ryuthrowsstuff

ryuthrowsstuff — Sun, 16 Dec 2012 20:05:00 +0000

Once upon a time laptop building was the new hot thing with gaming pc builders. There were a few cases out there with batteries/power supplies built in, and the requisite monitors were available from the usual parts sources. If memory serves the trend died rather quickly. It wasn’t any cheaper than buying an existing laptop, parts options were very limited, and the available cases were significantly thicker. There were also cooling issues iirc. This was probably around 98. Haven’t seen anything on laptop building since. Always seemed like a fun project, but it never seemed very practical.

By: sqyntz

sqyntz — Sun, 16 Dec 2012 20:03:00 +0000

would be pretty slick to retrofit this into an old PowerBook 100 or Duo shell

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerBook_100
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powerbook_Duo