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A $99 Laptop?! - Pinebook

James
By James
in LTT Releases
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Posted
1 hour ago, Aegelward said:

The Pinebook Pro looks kind of interesting, though they are still essentially hot gluing one of their SBC boards into a laptop chassis, Hopefully they'll do a more dedicated laptop board with m.2 and SODIMMs on it. 

It will have a PCI-e x4 - connector on board for NVME-drives, but no SO-DIMMs. (The SoC doesn't support more than 4GB RAM, so it'd be pointless to have DIMM-sockets.)

Hand, n. A singular instrument worn at the end of the human arm and commonly thrust into somebody’s pocket.

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Posted
6 hours ago, WereCatf said:

Which is?

 

Testing and development for ARM.  Also worth to mention is the excellent 2.4 GHz WiFi module, it's unlocked so you can change any parameter you want. That in it self opens up for a lot of fun for someone with the right knowledge.

 

But you really need to run a lightweight Linux and Manjaro in not the best choice for this even if you go with Xfce Edition.  Personally run without a graphical interface, you have no GUI slowing down the CPU and if you know what you are doing it's much faster just typing it then looking for it in a graphical interface. Actually same thing with windows: If you know what and how it's much faster to type the right command then using the GUI.

 

Back to the topic:

Friend of mine actually running Android on his Pinebook, for testing and development. For that purpose it's a great tool only wish is that it would have a GSM module but that you can solve via dongle.

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Posted
18 minutes ago, Kroon said:

Testing and development for ARM.

Does not seem particularly good choice for that, what with lacking a JTAG-port and all. There are better choices for ARM-dev.

Hand, n. A singular instrument worn at the end of the human arm and commonly thrust into somebody’s pocket.

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Posted

$99 is really cheap but the resulting product here is frankly pretty crappy.

However, for just a bit more you can get some really good price/quality deals from chinese brands.

Techtablets frequently reviews such devices and you can see his recommendations here.

I bought the Teclast F5 half a year ago and while still cheap it doesn't have any of the issues of the pinebook.

Maybe it would be interesting for LTT to review some of those?

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Posted
15 hours ago, WereCatf said:

One of the reasons why I consider the first Pinebook practically worthless. The Pro - version does boast H/W-accelerated 4K video-decoding, so it'll be a lot more useable media-consumption device.

There is the point...

 

On browsers in Linux there is not any hardware acceleration, Google doesn't want to maintain that part, so only unofficial chromium builds have hardware decoding on it.

Their excuse is the bad driver quality, which was true 10 years ago

 

Firefox just doesn't.

 

Only video players have that, so pretty much pointless using a 99€ hardware with hardware decoding capabilities not being used imo...

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Posted
10 minutes ago, Chunchunmaru_ said:

On browsers in Linux there is not any hardware acceleration, Google doesn't want to maintain that part, so only unofficial chromium builds have hardware decoding on it.

Their excuse is the bad driver quality, which was true 10 years ago

 

Firefox just doesn't.

Aye, I know. There's been an open ticket for va-api support in Firefox's bugzilla for 7 or 8 years now. There's plenty of this kind of basic stuff missing and it's why I, personally, do not consider Linux ready for the desktop yet.

Hand, n. A singular instrument worn at the end of the human arm and commonly thrust into somebody’s pocket.

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Posted
1 hour ago, WereCatf said:

Does not seem particularly good choice for that, what with lacking a JTAG-port and all. There are better choices for ARM-dev.

 

Depending on what type of testing you are doing. There is a lot of cases where you have no use for JTAG, testing peripheral equipment in one of them. If I as a developer had a choice I would rather have some GPIO then JTAG.  The development board Pine64 don't have JTAG headers but you can use en adapter and reconfig the microsd slot to get JTAG access. I would not be surprised if you could do the same thing with PineBook.

 

 

But it in the end it all depends on what you are developing, IoT device? Well then this is not for you.

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Posted

I would be more insterested in the Pinebook Pro as well. There aren't any cheap Linux laptop manufacturer. Purism and system76 only sell mid to high-end laptop.

Main Rig :

Ryzen 7 2700X | Powercolor Red Devil RX 580 8 GB | Gigabyte AB350M Gaming 3 | 16 GB TeamGroup Elite 2400MHz | Samsung 750 EVO 240 GB | HGST 7200 RPM 1 TB | Seasonic M12II EVO | CoolerMaster Q300L | Dell U2518D | Dell P2217H | 

 

Laptop :

Thinkpad X230 | i5 3320M | 8 GB DDR3 | V-Gen 128 GB SSD |

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Posted
5 minutes ago, Fatih19 said:

I would be more insterested in the Pinebook Pro as well. There aren't any cheap Linux laptop manufacturer. Purism and system76 only sell mid to high-end laptop.

Just out of curiosity, what'd you plan on doing with one, considering it won't be a particularly fast laptop? Me, I already have a big and beefy gaming-laptop, but I have no very light and easily portable one with great battery-life that I could just easily take with me if I was expecting not to be coming back home for a few hours. Could do some programming and studying on it, and it'd also do great for Steam In-home Streaming over OpenVPN-connection to my home.

Hand, n. A singular instrument worn at the end of the human arm and commonly thrust into somebody’s pocket.

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Posted
8 hours ago, Chunchunmaru_ said:

There is the point...

 

On browsers in Linux there is not any hardware acceleration, Google doesn't want to maintain that part, so only unofficial chromium builds have hardware decoding on it.

Their excuse is the bad driver quality, which was true 10 years ago

 

Firefox just doesn't.

 

Only video players have that, so pretty much pointless using a 99€ hardware with hardware decoding capabilities not being used imo...

 

There is hardware acceleration activated in FireFox just not for video. But the code for video acceleration are already in FireFox you only need to activate it.

In the Firefox address bar, type: about:config.

Search for layers.acceleration.force-enabled and change the value from ‘false’ to ‘true’. 

 

 

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Posted
14 minutes ago, Kroon said:

 

There is hardware acceleration activated in FireFox just not for video. But the code for video acceleration are already in FireFox you only need to activate it.

In the Firefox address bar, type: about:config.

Search for layers.acceleration.force-enabled and change the value from ‘false’ to ‘true’. 

 

 

I ended up using the new webrender instead, looks like it works better

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Posted
43 minutes ago, Kroon said:

There is hardware acceleration activated in FireFox just not for video. But the code for video acceleration are already in FireFox you only need to activate it.

In the Firefox address bar, type: about:config.

Search for layers.acceleration.force-enabled and change the value from ‘false’ to ‘true’.

That is not H/W video-decoding. H/W video-decoding is not supported under Linux, like I already mentioned before.The bugzilla-ticket is still open for that.

Hand, n. A singular instrument worn at the end of the human arm and commonly thrust into somebody’s pocket.

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Posted

I could see a use for this where I work, and Linux may actually be a plus rather than a hindrance. We use an old Asus EEE with Lubuntu as a portable console server when staging and preparing network devices or troubleshooting something without real Out Of Band Management connectivity. Connect it to a wifi, stuff USB ports with USB to serial adapters, SSH in and configure routers, switches + other active network elements before rack&stack or dispatch to final location. From comfy chair of office rather than being stuck in terribly lit storage room, or freezing inside extremely noisy datacenter floor. Granted, that's a pretty niche use. Other than that, I see it mostly for tinkerers. Had it had better drivers instead of usual proprietary binary blob, it could be used as "portable Pi in a really nice box" for whichever purpose can people come up with.

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Posted

Off topic but related to the video: what's that beautiful PC on the desk behind Linus ? *_*

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Posted

You can get an onda 961W for the same price, it has an quad core intel cpu, 32GB of flash storage and windows 8.1

Specs: Motherboard: Asus X470-PLUS TUF gaming (Yes I know it's poor but I wasn't informed) RAM: Corsair VENGEANCE® LPX DDR4 3200Mhz CL16-18-18-36 2x8GB

            CPU: Ryzen 9 5900X          Case: Antec P8     PSU: Corsair RM850x                        Cooler: Antec K240 with two Noctura Industrial PPC 3000 PWM

            Drives: Samsung 970 EVO plus 250GB, Micron 1100 2TB, Seagate ST4000DM000/1F2168 GPU: EVGA RTX 2080 ti Black edition

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Posted
2 hours ago, williamcll said:

You can get an onda 961W for the same price, it has an quad core intel cpu, 32GB of flash storage and windows 8.1

Seems to actually cost $17 more, no keyboard, only 5500mAh-battery, doesn't sport multiple USB-ports and only has a 720p display.

Hand, n. A singular instrument worn at the end of the human arm and commonly thrust into somebody’s pocket.

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Posted

ive been trying to get a pinebook for a long time now for project usage but every time i get the wait list email it gets burried. If you guys dont want it ill buy it off of you.

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  • 1 year later...
Posted

I know this is off topic, but i have been trying to figure out what PC case that is in the background for ... way too long. Does anyone know what it is? At first, I thought it was the inwin 805 infinity, but it looks way too small and appears to have a glass panel on the rear-side of the motherboard tray? I also thought it could be the Intertech X-608, but again with it having what appears to be a glass panel where the rear-side of the motherboard tray is throwing me off. HELP, PLEASE
 

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Posted
On 5/20/2019 at 3:20 AM, jeff6780 said:

ive been trying to get a pinebook for a long time now for project usage but every time i get the wait list email it gets burried. If you guys dont want it ill buy it off of you.

Do you need specifically a pine book. Just spend $30 more and get something better, even if it's used

Please tag me @Windows9 so I can see your reply

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