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"Weird" chips and how to find them
(hexbear.net)
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this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2023
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this probably isnt what you want but the pinephone pro+keyboard accessory is a pretty neat little linux handheld (if very janky in some ways)
or the original pinephone is probably fine if you're mostly going to stay in a terminal
I have one of those! I like it but it just doesn't have the same feel as a Jornada or something lol
The battery life is atrocious too. The RK3399 and ARM are also pretty janky on their own tbh. Especially boot-up...
Isn't this beautiful?
the part where it's running windows not so much but it's a better kb layout for sure
The ppp is growing on me, especially since suspend and camera and shit work now but it is still janky (mine tried to melt a pogo pin
) and the battery life is atrocious yeah (though not bad with the keyboard's 6000mAh!!). It may end up being a bridge for me that leads to not having a smartphone at all though lol.
Honestly I don't mind the boot-up, tow-boot with built in jump drive is nice, and once its in linux I don't have to care.
There's an aftermarket battery claiming 3500mAh that does anecdotally feel like it's actually a bit better than stock (and a lot better than the shitty offbrands I've bought before)
For me it's just a matter of something that actually works tho, I don't have nearly the time to build my own shit with custom chips on an architecture with even less support than aarch64. I'm already putting a lot into getting shit to work on mobile linux ARM
Yeahh lol they shipped with Windows CE. The cool thing is most of these have Linux or NetBSD ports!
Yeah I'm so glad they fixed the suspend. That really made the difference with it being usable or not. Sorry to hear about your pogo pin. One of my sim card holder pins broke off but I managed to shim it with a piece of tin foil lol. One of my other problems with hardware like this is that it's so easy to break ;w;
I just meant that the de facto standard for bringing up ARM machines is U-boot... which I hate dealing with. I just wish we had Open Firmware (IEEE 1275) everywhere rather than UEFI or U-boot tbh. Tow-boot is at least simple for the end user.
Oh of course, I just like hacking on hardware lol. I really dislike how PINE64 has taken such a hands-off approach with their hardware. It took years for the PPP to even get to this mildly-usable point. If I ever complete my hardware I'm gonna port the software it needs personally. Probably Plan 9 and NetBSD. (Linux is a mess all of its own...)
Partly inspired by this comment I actually fixed my melty pogo pin so I could switch back to using the keyboard! It wasn't bad. I already had the pine64 replacement pins that are supposed to be a bit better, and thankfully the hole for the pin wasn't totally destroyed like the ones I've seen pictures of online, so I just gave it a nudge with a soldering iron and it settled back into its proper position/angle.
Agreed on pine64's approach. I'm fine if they don't want to be a software company but they need to just pay some kernel developers to get hardware support done and mainlined quickly for new devices if they want them to succeed. Their model almost kinda worked for the OG pinephone, there was enough buzz and development effort to get it to a usable state, but starting over all that work from scratch for every new device with little to no investment from the company that's actually collecting the money for these things is so demoralizing. the pinephone/tab/book all just rely on one guy in czechia for the kernel support who is just hoping that if he doesn't release his source some company will contract him to do similar work for their products. and the distro situation isn't better, pretty sure the "official" ish distro for the pinetab 2 is danctnix which is just run by one very busy weeb hobbyist as far as I can tell lol
But yeah honestly low level software and hardware stuff is mostly over my head. it's cool though, I try to always check it out when I get a chance. What do you even do on a plan 9 system? seems like it'd be hard to do anything resembling the modern web or run most applications on a system that obscure. but I also know next to nothing about it
Glad you got it fixed!
Yeahh fr
What's up with the kernel from the guy in Czechia? I knew most of the distros aren't shipping mainline kernels but it's so hard to find info online on this topic lol.
lol. Yeahh, even the official distro for most of the other Pine hardware is the most
-pilled and mismanaged Linux project out there relative to how popular it is (Manjaro).
Yeah, stuff like the web requires infrastructure like web browsers that is not very portable and on the order of millions of lines of code in size. A web browser is basically like an operating system of its own these days. That being said there is a Netsurf port to 9front and virtualization support on PCs in 9front (so you can run Linux). It's a very different system and radically simpler than modern Unix or Windows. But it was designed by the people who made Unix with modern networking in mind and with the knowledge that everyone has a computer now (the word everyone used loosely). A lot of people (including me) just find it very easy and pleasing to write software for and use. You can accomplish a lot more with a lot less code. It's extremely portable too, which makes it appealing as an official OS for a new hardware platform.
megi is the name of the kernel dev from czechia. He's put in a lot of work and he's pretty active in the matrix chats, but he's not big on upstreaming his changes and some of his side projects he doesn't even release the code... this seems like a good summary https://momi.ca/posts/2022-09-07-mainline.html
I think he might be doing a bit of "making himself necessary" in the ecosystem of A64 based devices tbh, You can't entirely blame him but its bad for the community long term.
Manjaro is a mess though yeah, I used it for a while since it came on the pinebook/pinephone but I had to nope out.
Plan9 is pretty befuddling still ngl but I'm starting to like what I see. I might have to install it on a raspberry pi and see what the fuss is about
Thanks for the article! That 500k line diff from mainline is scary...
Highly recommend this video to help you get around the UI: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dt3Dr3jUPjo
Hope you have fun if you decide to try!