Remember The EOMA68 Computer Card Project? It Hopes To Ship This Year

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Remember The EOMA68 Computer Card Project? It Hopes To Ship This Year

The EOMA68 computer card project is the open-source hardware effort that aims to be Earth-friendly and allow for interchangeable computer cards that can be installed in laptop housings and other devices. The ambitious concept relying upon ARM SoCs raised more than $170k USD via crowdfunding in 2016 but its lineage dates back to the failed Improv dev board as well as the failed KDE Vivaldi tablet years earlier. It turns out in 2018 there is hope of EOMA68 hardware finally shipping...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=EOMA68-2018-Shipping-Plans

[tildearrow]

Typo?:

along with the micr-desktop housing

[lucrus]

Talk about beating a dead horse!

1 November 2018
BREAKING NEWS!

The EOMA68 team releases a new laptop, supercharged with a whopping 8GB of storage, Cortex A7 Dual core and a wonderful Mali400 graphics section. It's aimed at enthusiasts and professionals, who do not fear manually loading their preferred Linux distro, though, to be honest, the Mali 400 is not supported by Linux as of now. Independent developers however managed to get a graphics desktop with the latest release of Windows CE.

The famous Phoronix site has run benchmarks to show us the hidden power of this new laptop under Linux. You get as much as 157FPS while playing overkill!

You may think 8GB of storage are not that much, but when you consider the use cases of this laptop you suddendly realize you'll have hard time filling the available space. For the same reason, 2GB of RAM are way more than you'll ever need on this device.

The downside is the price: being a modular laptop, it costs a bit more than a common low end laptop you find at the store downtown. However you'll save a lot on the electricity bill, because you never need to power on a paperweight!

Lenovo spokesperson declared the company foresees a 12-15% market share loss in the upcoming quarter because of this new player in the laptop market, but they're evaluating counter-moves and new products to contrast EOMA68 out of control growth.

Major worldwide stock exchanges today suspended the EOMA68 title for excessive rise of its stocks price.

(Sorry, no native english here, maybe I've written some funny sentences, but I'm sure you get the point).

[wizard69]

While i know some will disagree with me, i dont see the point in such a system. Especially for laptops. There is a remote possibility of traction in the embedded market but i dont see knowledgeable PC owners jumping on the band wagon.

This comment is from a guy wishing for a viable ARM based laptop too. I can wish these guys good luck in thier venture but i kinda doubt i will be a customer.

[Michael_S]

I backed the project. The guy has posted detailed updates at the crowdsupply website and to the mailing list at http://lists.phcomp.co.uk/pipermail/arm-netbook/ - note, however, that the discussion is deeply technical about hardware and about the realities of the Chinese hardware suppliers market, and unfortunately the guy could be posting gibberish about both and I don't know enough to tell.

While i know some will disagree with me, i dont see the point in such a system. Especially for laptops. There is a remote possibility of traction in the embedded market but i dont see knowledgeable PC owners jumping on the band wagon.

This comment is from a guy wishing for a viable ARM based laptop too. I can wish these guys good luck in thier venture but i kinda doubt i will be a customer.

The plan, which I liked, had several attractive ideas:

1. Post detailed, open specifications of every piece of hardware so anyone else could manufacture the exact same device to the exact same specs.

2. Standardize on dimensions, heat dissipation, connectors, and power needs so that when a newer and more powerful hardware revision became available the user could swap out the PCMCIA-sized card in their computing device (laptop, miniature desktop, potentially others) and continue using everything else, and even reuse or sell the older computer card. And to repeat the first point, the creator of the upgraded revision did not need to be the same company that made the original card. Different companies could enter the same market and sell compatible computers and also computing laptop and desktop cases.

3. Run fully open source software from top to bottom. You can order the device with the proprietary drivers for the Mali GPU, but you can also get Trisquel or similar firmware-free (but slower) options.

...but yes, the hardware was all but obsolete when the crowd funding campaign launched a year and a half ago. Even with 2GB of RAM (vs. the 1GB in the Raspberry Pi, for example), the device will probably be agonizingly slow to use.

(EDIT) But I am desperately hoping the idea catches on. My smart phone is three years old and adequately fast for browsing the web, so if revision 2 or 3 of the EOMA68 hardware will be as good or better than that I could probably live with it for everything except my software development day job.

[caligula]

Your 3 yo smartphone is probably a high end model, a20 is not. Your phone also has accelerated graphics. It won't be nearly as fast.

a20: http://browser.geekbench.com/geekbench3/2990651
3 yo middle range phone: https://browser.geekbench.com/geekbench3/8518684

[pal666]

5 generation old display will be monochrome tn passive matrix?

[boltronics]

I've ordered one as well, with the desktop dock and laptop (self assembly option). Sadly, I agree that it's probably going to be too slow to be practical for much when it arrives. Maybe fine for just running Emacs in a framebuffer terminal, but all my existing machines can do that better. I hate to think how slow it'll be after full disk encryption, since I consider that essential - especially for something so portable.

I've since purchased a 13" laptop that has a 4K screen and 1Tb M.2 SSD and boots almost as quickly as I can type the passphrase to unlock the HDD and type my login passwords. It's got a working touchscreen (I run GNU/Linux on it obviously) and the screen can fold back to switch it to tablet mode - no need to swap a card to a different device. It charges over USB Type-C (just like my phone and Nintendo Switch) so no need for a dedicated laptop charger (although maybe there will be a USB Type-C to USB Mini adapter for the EOMA68), great battery life, etc. Using the EOMA68 will likely be painful at this point.

Hopefully the specs are opened and some more powerful alternatives come to market much more quickly.

[bibaheu]

I've ordered one as well, with the desktop dock and laptop (self assembly option). Sadly, I agree that it's probably going to be too slow to be practical for much when it arrives. Maybe fine for just running Emacs in a framebuffer terminal, but all my existing machines can do that better. I hate to think how slow it'll be after full disk encryption, since I consider that essential - especially for something so portable.

I've since purchased a 13" laptop that has a 4K screen and 1Tb M.2 SSD and boots almost as quickly as I can type the passphrase to unlock the HDD and type my login passwords. It's got a working touchscreen (I run GNU/Linux on it obviously) and the screen can fold back to switch it to tablet mode - no need to swap a card to a different device. It charges over USB Type-C (just like my phone and Nintendo Switch) so no need for a dedicated laptop charger (although maybe there will be a USB Type-C to USB Mini adapter for the EOMA68), great battery life, etc. Using the EOMA68 will likely be painful at this point.

Hopefully the specs are opened and some more powerful alternatives come to market much more quickly.

What laptop is that? I'm in the market looking for a laptop, and yours sounds ideal for what I want.

[johanb]

What laptop is that? I'm in the market looking for a laptop, and yours sounds ideal for what I want.

There are multiple models with those specs, but they are incredibly expensive. Latest ThinkPad X1 Carbon laptops for example has a 4K screen + 1TB ssd option which would make it have the same specs and runs Linux very well.