Libre Hardware

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 🙂

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.

• Is there an option to limit the charge? Keeping Li-ion cells constantly at 100% (or worse, charging all the time) when the laptop is plugged in isn't ideal. I'd rather it kept the cells charged around 80% . And I mostly use my laptops plugged in.

• Can I remove the cells and use the laptop plugged in? I might eschew the cells altogether, because I really never need them: I'm plugged in at home, I'm plugged in on the train, I'm plugged in at the hotel, I'm plugged in at the customer's. I can't remember a time when I needed to run this particular laptop on battery. If I can use the laptop as a luggable computer, I wouldn't need to carry the weight of the cells around.

• Has anybody tried to install Cinnamon? Does it work well on Debian ARM? I see no reason why it shouldn't, but maybe there are issues.

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.

What do you think? Has anyone here tried out the Milk-V?

Seems like it still does have some proprietary components but hey, that's a big improvement for now.

I am referring to both the design, and the independent, and auditable manufacture of the CPU. It should be noted that such a CPU needn't fully compete with modern ARM, Intel, AMD, etc. CPUs, but it would be an incredible boon to have a fully trustworthy piece of hardware, even if it is considerably lower in it's strength. For specifics, let's say a CPU that could run a lightweight Linux distro at a "tolerable" speed.

Creating the designs for the CPU, of course while still difficult, is, most likely, the most feesbile aspect -- I presume it would "just" consist of writing the Verilog, or some other hardware description language to describe the CPU's function. The manufacture, however, is a substantial obstacle. Modern photolithography is, quite litterally, at the very forefront of human technological creation. I am just hoping that turning back the clock perhaps 20 years on the technological complexity might reduce the barrier to entry.

geteilt von: https://feddit.de/post/3049646

geteilt von: https://feddit.de/post/3048730

Github link: https://github.com/Dakkaron/Fairberry

Here's a video of it in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDb8_ld9gOQ

I've been using it for almost two years now, and I'm not going back.

It's based on a spare Blackberry Q10 keyboard and a custom Arduino-compatible board that reads the keyboard matrix and outputs it as USB HID to the phone. From the viewpoint of the phone, it's just a regular USB keyboard, so no special software is needed.

But I do use a custom virtual keyboard to have just two rows of symbols that are not natively on the keyboard, as I didn't want to add another layer of rarely used symbols that I'd have to memorize.

(On the image you can see Ubuntu with XFCE4 running on it. I chose Ubuntu because it's what was easiest to get running in a chroot jail on the phone. I'm using VNC to display the GUI. I even managed to get FEX (x86/x64 emulator) and Wine running, so it runs x86/x64 Linux and Windows apps.)

Btw: Is there maybe someone who wants to make a little side money? There are tons of people who say they'd buy this, but I don't want to make them.

The designs are all online and I'm happy to help. So if someone wants to make and sell them, that would be really cool! (I don't want or need any financial compensation. I'd just be happy if people have access to this.)

My wishlist:

• Disabled Intel ME
• Libreboot/Coreboot
• From Europe if possible
• For running 100% free distro

The German Federal Ministry of Education and Research announces to fund the development of an open-source chip design ecosystem. This includes also design software.

The most difficult thing about hardware to have 'libre' are the silicon chips. But times start changing. Hopefully.

The program of FSiC2023 contains diverse talks about chip design with open-source CAD tools open-source hardware (FPGA, ASIC).

r/hardware

I had a person ask me the other day if I knew of any stores that sell hardware with Linux preinstalled in Africa; Latin America or Russia and I couldn't think of any. I know plenty in Europe; U.S.A. and Canada but none for those places. Do any of you know of any ? They didn't mean stores that will ship there but stores that are based there.

I recently received my MSI PRO Z690-A DDR4 motherboard from Dasharo. It came with version 1.0 which from what I understand has a different update process than later versions. Am I correct in understanding that I need to open a Terminal and type in "flashrom -p internal -w [path] --ifd -i bios" substituting the path bit there with the actual path to the file I downloaded ? Figured I would ask first before diving in.