[chbot] PineBook

[Geoff]

The chromebook was a Medion Akoya E2225T. The first OS I ran on it was
Archbang with the i3 window manager, and it ran most applications fine.
Chrome and Firefox both used a fair amount of it's RAM and were a little
slow. (I find it somewhat ironic how a web browser is one of the slowest
and biggest commonly used pieces of software on a modern PC, and yet we
sell low-cost low-power PC's for web browsing). I later put ubuntu 18.04
LTS on it, the normal graphical one. The experience wasn't so great
probably due to the low-power GPU. As soon as I removed
Gnome/unity/whatever-it-is-these-days and used a light-weight Desktop
Environment, the experience using it got much better.

Rather hilariously, the Archbang installation was easier. The
text-user-interface (TUI) installer worked first time without any issues at
all. Ubuntu took a couple goes as the bootloader failed to install the
first time. I think that was because I was trying to do something fancy
with the partitions and made a mistake on the bootloader target partition.
I think using the suggested partition scheme was what ended up working.
As mentioned earlier, the sound card is unsupported, though it seems the
digital audio over HDMI is. Fortunately I don't really have the need for
this when using it as a server. The lid-closed switch had a hardware fault
such that every few seconds the laptop would decide I had shut the lid and
that it should go into suspend mode. (This was an issue on it's windows OS
as well). After some googling I discovered that the settings for this were
in /etc/systemd/logind.conf where you can set the action for the various
buttons to "ignore". It took a couple of attempts to actually make the edit
to this file....

I think newer chrombooks have proper UEFI's. I think the 32-bit EFI 64-bit
CPU was only done for a couple of years when UEFI's were relatively new. A
quick google tells me that this was limited to the intel bay-trail CPU's,
so the newer ones should work fine. All the ones available here in Europe
are the newer generation (cpu numbers start at 8000), but when I browse the
NZ stores it looks like you still have a lot of the bay-trail processors
(processor numbers start at 3000). So if you plan to put a linux on it, you
may want to check the processor.

Geoff


On Sat, Dec 1, 2018 at 11:33 PM Michael Field <hamster at snap.net.nz> wrote:

> A lot of the low low low end Intel laptops seem to have really poor bios
> support for anything. The <$200 Bay Trail IdeaPad 110s I have has a 64-bit
> capable CPU, but with a 32-bit UEFI only BIOS, making it close to
> impossible to get it to do anything but 32-bit Windows.
>
> However, battery life is great, it is perfect as a SSH terminal, a handy
> way to Google something, fine a frontend to USB scopes, or something to
> throw in the car if you suspect that a dinner invite is actually a 'fix my
> router' request.
>
> The only issue is the small 32MB embedded storage. After a while Windows
> update fills it with junk, and the only sensible fix is a factory default
> reset followed with just the latest update set.
>
> Maybe look for one used as a lost leader in the boxing day sales....
>
> Mike.
>
>
>
> -------- Original Message --------
> Subject: Re: [chbot] PineBook
> From: Volker Kuhlmann
> To: Christchurch Robotics
> CC:
>
>
> On Sun 02 Dec 2018 00:46:27 NZDT +1300, Geoff wrote:
>
> That's interesting about the chromebook. What OS did/do you run on it?
> Did you try installing a Linux distro on it from scratch, and how easy
> was that?
>
> Ta,
>
> Volker
>
> PS Looking on pricespy, chromebooks seem to start at more like
> N$300-400 here.
>
> --
> Volker Kuhlmann
> http://volker.top.geek.nz/ Please do not CC list postings to me.
>
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