More Details On The Do-It-Yourself ARM64 Laptop

[phoronix]

Phoronix: More Details On The Do-It-Yourself ARM64 Laptop

Last week I wrote about the in-development, build-it-yourself 64-bit ARM open-source laptop. That generated a fair amount of interest by the community in Olimex's work and now some more details have emerged...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...Laptop-Details

[Mama Luigi]

That's a good idea, but an Allwinner SoC?

[wizard69]

Honestly it looks to be a bit flimsy. I like the general idea though of a DIY chassis. What we really need to get this going is a standardized motherboard layout, fully spec'ed out so that compatible boards can be built. Frankly tech has changed so much with respect to portables that most previous standards have been invalidated. About the only thing that is close to current these days is some of the SSD formats and ihose leave a lot to be desired for a thin laptop.

[wizard69]

That's a good idea, but an Allwinner SoC?

What is wrong with AllWinner? They are at least trying to get support in the Linux community whil many other manufactures thumb their noses at Linux. Any problems that AllWinner did have where completely blown out of proportion to reality. Now if you had said performance sucks well that is another discussion. Since nobody has access to Apples ARM SOC technology any ARM based machine will be trailing state of the art.

[grege]

As with all ARM devices it comes down to video drivers. It is pointless to release a device that requires a binary blob and then never up date it. So many of these boards will only work with Ubuntu 12.04 and as soon as you try anything newer you lose 3D. Not an issue if you are building a headless embedded system for whatever reason, but once you step into the world of using displays then you need proper video drivers. Linux users will always favour open source. Binary blobs will do, but only if there is a new blob available for each new kernel.

[robclark]

What is wrong with AllWinner? They are at least trying to get support in the Linux community whil many other manufactures thumb their noses at Linux. Any problems that AllWinner did have where completely blown out of proportion to reality. Now if you had said performance sucks well that is another discussion. Since nobody has access to Apples ARM SOC technology any ARM based machine will be trailing state of the art.

same problem as w/ intel atom.. ;-)

[Mama Luigi]

What is wrong with AllWinner? They are at least trying to get support in the Linux community while many other manufactures thumb their noses at Linux. Any problems that AllWinner did have where completely blown out of proportion to reality.

http://linux-sunxi.org/GPL_Violations (but not as bad as WonderMedia)

Now if you had said performance sucks well that is another discussion.

For this kind of thing, I'd let performance slide (except for the GPU portion that was released in 2009 and is severely out of date, only supporting up to GLES 2.0)