arm-netbook September 2016

arm-netbook@lists.phcomp.co.uk

39 participants
42 discussions

The sincerest form of flattery
by Mike Leimon 17 Sep '16

17 Sep '16

I saw this link today and thought to myself that it looked awfully familiar.... http://liliputing.com/2016/09/closer-look-kangaroo-notebook-modular-pc-syst… While I am hoping their pilot program is successful (because modular and upgradeable laptops is a great idea), this whole implementation appears to be proprietary from top to bottom and without any concern for libre usage. I suppose the other positive aspect to this (assuming the product takes off for them) is that there will a larger consumer base out there that is familiar with this sort of modular device paradigm. Perhaps at that point, the concept of the EOMA68 standard won't be such a stretch of the imagination for some people. Anyhow, it was an interesting read.

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EOMA68 Libre laptop PCB2
by Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton 16 Sep '16

16 Sep '16

http://rhombus-tech.net/community_ideas/laptop_15in/news/EOMA68_Libre_15.6i… quick update, i had to go back to using the 640x480 camera as the casio camera belongs to chris. i look forward to making an EOMA68 camcorder. ironically it'll need a full processor actually inside the Housing (probably something like an allwinner R8) as it needs to be able to do full HD video encode *on-board*. not enough bandwidth to get videos out of USB2 otherwise. --- crowd-funded eco-conscious hardware: https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68

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Briefly plugged EOMA68 on Hacker News
by Matt Campbell 14 Sep '16

14 Sep '16

On an HN thread about disabling the Intel ME (management engine), someone mentioned Talos and Novena as backdoor-free alternatives. So I put in a good word for EOMA68. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12489544 Matt

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Re: [Arm-netbook] [Dev] [libreplanet-discuss] EOMA68 and freedom in digital technology
by Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton 14 Sep '16

14 Sep '16

--- crowd-funded eco-conscious hardware: https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68 On Sat, Sep 10, 2016 at 9:07 PM, Josh Branning <lovell.joshyyy(a)gmail.com> wrote: > On 10/09/16 20:38, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote: >>> >>> See what Olimex has been doing for years then. >> >> >> you're aware that olimex operates as a criminal cartel, from shipping >> GPL-violating A10 bootloaders and kernels provided by Allwinner, back >> around 2011/2012? you're also aware that with the sole exception of >> the olimex laptop's PCBs the only thing that they provide is >> auto-generated PDFs *from* the schematics source code... not the >> actual schematics and certainly not the PCB design files? > > > I think this is a little unfair to Olimex and is at least partially untrue. > For instance, schematics and pcb files CAN be found, for most of their > boards. [1] yes - you're catching up (three people kindly pointed this out) > Unlike your boards, which give a 404 forbidden message when trying to access > the server. [2] Hopefully this is something you can correct. it has. explained also in other posts since you replied to this. > Though I can see that the advantage over the Olimex boards is that you ship > with a libre operating system from the start. which gives you a clear message: i will *not* compromise on software freedom for the purposes of profit maximisation. actually it's more specific than that: i will NOT put designs into people's hands when i know that they will become distressed as a result (due to viruses emptying their bank accounts, or being forced to spend money on throwing away perfectly good hardware due to software driver incompatibility and so on). > In regards to the A64 (used in the Olimex laptop), /mainline/ u-boot, from > the sunxi.org wiki [3]: u-boot is not the early bootloader. the early bootloader is proprietary. > ' Basic support for the A64 SoC has been been merged into 2016.05-rc1. > This covers UART, MMC and required GPIOs and clocks, but no Ethernet or USB > yet. Also as there is no information on the DRAM controller so far, the SPL > support is not enabled, so boot0 is required at the moment to get U-Boot > loaded. ... and is that early bootloader, boot0, proprietary or not, yes or no? > Also, I think that the Olimex laptop has not yet been released, so that > gives developers time to build more support, before they start selling. meanwhile, the opportunity has been totally lost, to put a financial "foot down" (just as with NextThingCo did with Allwinner over the R8) i.e. to say "no, allwinner, we will *not* place an order for 50,000 units with you *UNTIL* you give us the full source code including the full source code of the early bootloader, boot0" now the sunxi community is expected to pick up the pieces - unpaid - and to clean up allwinner's mess. oh, but worse than that, the team behind the Allwinner A64 think it's *OKAY* to consider boot0 to be proprietary! just because pine64 and olimex took your money instead of setting software freedom as a first priority. tell me: how is that okay? if you *really think* it is okay, explain how. l.

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[libreplanet-discuss] EOMA68 and freedom in digital technology
by Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton 13 Sep '16

13 Sep '16

sorry, i'm receiving this as digest mode, from libreplanet, and haven't been watching it (or the other lists cc'd). i'll try to recreate the cc set of lists, apologies in advance if this doesn't get through to all of them. also, please be aware that i'm leaving for HK in about 10 hours time and it's an extremely long flight, so i'll be offline for at least the next 2 days. also i'm adding arm-netbook (needs subscription) because i'd like to make people on that list aware of this discussion, which appears to have been ongoing for some time. >> I disagree. There is simply nothing you can compare this project to. We >> are achieving results that can't be demonstrated via any other means. If >> we could get here some other way at a lower cost with the same long term >> impact I would have gone that route. > > See what Olimex has been doing for years then. you're aware that olimex operates as a criminal cartel, from shipping GPL-violating A10 bootloaders and kernels provided by Allwinner, back around 2011/2012? you're also aware that with the sole exception of the olimex laptop's PCBs the only thing that they provide is auto-generated PDFs *from* the schematics source code... not the actual schematics and certainly not the PCB design files? > They're also coming up with a laptop design. ... where they've taken off-the-shelf china-sourced (proprietary) casework: i started the GPLv3+ casework project for the EOMA68 15.6in laptop housing *two years* ago as a completely and fully libre project. you can verify that by looking at the git commit logs. tsvetan has caused a hell of a lot of trouble for the EOMA68 project and has sponged off of the resources of a *lot* of people. he truly doesn't understand the word "libre". at all. also, the A64's processor - which tsvetan is using for the olimex laptop - requires a proprietary early-bootloader. in fact, the first A64 SDK that came out was an absolute mess, comprising several GPL violations in both the early-bootloader, the u-boot source *and* the linux kernel. the SDK was even exclusively distributed over a chinese illegal filesharing network (this is an "official" released SDK from allwinner!) over a considerable period of time, pine64 and the sunxi community worked to eliminate as many of those GPL violations as they could, but Allwinner insisted on keeping the early-bootloader proprietary. so at present the A64 is classified as a "non-libre" processor. that it's the basis of the olimex laptop tells you everything you need to know. to tsevetan's credit he is doing his best as he understands it, but there's nobody taking him to task on the things that matter to software freedom. he's happy to take your money even if it means selling you product that requires proprietary software. he's *less* happy to then *invest* that money into helping solve the issues which create all the problems that go *with* proprietary software. now, whilst tsevtan is making money selling you hardware that requires non-free components to operate basic functions, i've put my foot down and said NO, i will NOT sell GPL-violating product. i don't care if that means it's harder to deliver ethical products, i'll deal with that on an ongoing basis, but here's the thing: it means i've established a reputation for setting some ethical rules *AND STUCK TO THEM*. > I agree that you went steps further than most before, but this is > incremental improvement, not something truly new and groundbreaking compared to > what existed before. hmmm, an interesting perspective, which i feel may be based on not being aware of the sheer overwhelming number of issues being tackled (all at once). yes it's "incremental improvement" but it's a MASSIVE stack of MULTIPLE "incremental improvements", all done at once. *nobody* has tried to do that before. not Dell, not Olimex, not IBM - *nobody*. for example you compare the EOMA68 Housing to the olimex laptop. the olimex laptop's casework is proprietary (the EOMA68 Housing's is GPLv3+ libre-licensed). so automatically you can see that it's nowhere near being a legitimate comparison. >> The issue is your looking at one thing. A few specs. It's not the specs? >> that matter. It's the standard, it's the modularization, it's the? >> response and cooperation we are getting already as a result of our? >> actions here, etc. Intel and AMD are not going to cooperate and building? >> off of other companies products (higher up the chain) is not a reliable? >> long term solution. > > Again, I don't see how modularization changes anything here. you can't focus on just the one aspect and conclude that "it's not significant". bear in mind that this has been a 5 year project, where i've had 15 years of working near-exclusively with software libre, looking at the endemic and systemic problems and coming up with a *long-term* strategy to tackle *all* of the issues associated with the consequences of proprietary computing... *all at once*. modularisation (and having open standards despite what the wikipedia-page-that's-already-scheduled-for-deletion would have you believe) is one - *one* - critical - *critical* part of that strategy. > Hardware availability has never been the problem. libre hardware availability has *always* been a problem. entropy guarantees that it always will. you actually have to make a concerted continuous effort to push back against the corner-cost-cutting of the mass-volume industry. > For laptops, we only had minor > annoyances,?like Wi-Fi chips that require proprietary firmwares, proprietary firmware for WIFI is a bit more than a "minor" annoyance, paul! > with the most > advanced designs for freedom like ARM Chromebooks. So you took a step forward > there. It's not a revolution, it's a step forward: solving the (minor) Wi-Fi > issue. For single-board computers, you didn't bring any specific improvement > over Olimex's Allwinner boards. at least we waited until we could get the entire set of sources for as much of the hardware as we could get (the only exception being that we haven't got a libre MALI driver yet, but there's even a plan to deal with that). no, paul, what you're missing here is that there's an *active committment* to tackling the pain, cost burden and inconvenience that proprietary software (and hardware) causes. everybody else - Dell, IBM, HP, Asus, Olimex, they're all *sleep-walking* - making MONEY off of you (and everyone else) because you really don't know any better, you think it's *okay* to throw away a perfectly good printer because its proprietary driver is no longer "compatible" with modern OSes. there's no *active* committment from any of these companies to *actually* try and solve the problems.... because they don't understand that there *is* even a problem! > Again, I don't want to sound like your project doesn't matter to me, because it > really does. Only that it's an improved iteration over what exists rather than > whole new ground. And that's totally fine by the way, it is a very sane way to > go. It also shows that you're not the only person on earth caring about these > issues and producing hardware that solves an increasing number of them (even > though I suspect some other players produce devices with such results without > really aiming at that goal). exactly. there's no coordinated committment. they sell you product because you buy it... because you don't have any other choices, so you don't ask, so you keep buying more product, which gives them money to keep on doing what they're doing.... .... it's a vicious self-sustaining cycle that has to be broken by an *active* committment. ok i leave it at that. l.

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RAM
by Vincent Legoll 13 Sep '16

13 Sep '16

Hello, and apologies if this already has been talked about, I tried to find previous discussions on ML archives, elinux & rhombus sites. It looks like the DRAM will be standard DDR3, has low power DDR3 been studied ? Too expensive ? No available init code ? I ask because some other ARM boards differentiate themselves from the other one by using LPDDR3 and that has much better power consumption characteristics, and so do not heat as much. The regular DDR3 ones (in certain cases have a heat problem and have to be down-clocked to operate properly whereas the LP ones don't... On the same subject of heat dissipation, some boards use a layer of the pcb just below the soc to act as a heat spreader by having a copper area that is not used for signals, and it looks like this is effective, because other boards that don't have it endure heat problems. I had a look at EOMA PCB pictures, but I lack knowledge to definitely tell if there is such a copper layer provisioned. Thanks And Luke, don't overwhelm yourself into burn out. -- Vincent Legoll

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Housing idea: screenless laptop
by Matt Campbell 13 Sep '16

13 Sep '16

Hi, It occurred to me that for blind people, who use a screen reader such as Speakup or Orca, a laptop housing without the screen or the touchpad would be quite convenient. And if this housing used the same battery as the regular laptop housing, it would last longer because there's no screen. To the engineers on the list, how difficult would it be to modify the current laptop housing to remove the screen and touchpad? I suppose there are two ways to go about removing the touchpad: either it could just be replaced with empty space, or the keyboard could be moved to the front. In the latter case, how much smaller could the housing be made without removing anything inside (battery, space for a USB dongle, etc.)? Matt

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how to use the stand-alone cables
by chadvellacott＠sasktel.net 12 Sep '16

12 Sep '16

Regarding the offerings on the page at "Crowd Supply"- To use one of the computer-cards as stand-alone, with the cable-set offered for that purpose, do I just- (1) buy "a smartphone / tablet 2A USB-OTG Charger (which is easily found at any store these days including Walmart or Asda’s)", (2) connect the 3-way cable to (a) that charger, (b) the computer-card, and (c) the HDMI-cable, (3) connect some HDMI-screen to (a) the computer-card and (b) the HDMI-cable? Where or how would I connect a key-board and a "mouse"? I do not remember reading anywhere that such could be directly connected to the "EOMA 68"-card, but perhaps I am forgetting something relevant about that standard. The "Intel Compute Stick" seems to use "Bluetooth" for those (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Compute_Stick), and the "Chromebit" seems to add the possibility of "WiFi" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromebit), ... but how will Rhombus-Tech's stand-alone enable these peripherals? Eagerly, Chad. (:^)

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by "Resin" (versus "PLA"), is meant what? ABS?
by chadvellacott＠sasktel.net 12 Sep '16

12 Sep '16

Considering which "PFY" lap-top housing to choose. On the page on "Crowd Supply", for the "PFY" lap-top housings, most of the options involved "PLA", but one was rather "Resin". I imagine that by the former is meant "Polylactic acid" <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLA_polymer>. But that is listed under "Resin Identification Code" 7 <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resin_identification_code#History> so seems to itself be considered a kind of Resin. [Rats, an ambiguity. (:^) ] So what is meant by "Resin", in the list of options? If the meaning is "ABS", then this comparison is relevant- <http://www.absplastic.eu/pla-vs-abs-plastic-pros-cons/> Ideally, I'd like something which is- (a) sturdy enough to let a clumsy adult use, and sturdy enough to gift to a child (even if the child is just starting to use a computer), (b) can be left in a hot car without deforming, (c) can be used in temperatures as cold as the parts can handle, without becoming brittle (any one for computing outside in fresh air, in winter?), (d) durable enough to last as long as the parts, (e) transparent, so that I can see the inner parts through the housing, (f) made from renewable materials, (g) safer during the 3D-printing. But I suspect that the "PLA"-option does not meet A to D as well as the "Resin / Black" does. I guess that then my decision is not so easy. Hoping to pre-"order" soon, Chad. (:^)

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"zombie" campaign
by chadvellacott＠sasktel.net 12 Sep '16

12 Sep '16

So, as mentioned in my list-message "Sorry to Luke (and others)", I have some questions. This message is just to give context for the questions. The questions are regarding the campaign on "Crowd Supply". I HAVE NOT YET SENT MY ORDER AND PAYMENT. But from a private reply from Luke (quoted next below), I guess that we have SOME more time. I will number the "e"mails of questions, as to priority for me deciding whether and what to back, with #1 as top priority for me. (This is not to be pushy, just to inform you what can most help me personally.) (Actually, now I am thinking to buy the printed lap-top kit, plus the desk-top housing, plus the stand-alone, plus one or more libre-tea cards, plus the break-out board, plus the pass-through card.) (By the capitals, I did not mean to "shout". I just meant "emphasis". Do you prefer "emphasis" be marked not by capitals but rather *thus* or _thus_?) (Quotes below, might have minor changes, and might have additions enclosed by {}, and ~ for omissions.) On 16.8.26 12:11, lkcl . <lkcl(a)rhombus-tech.net> wrote: > On ~, {8th month}~ 26, 2016 at 6:33 PM, Crowd Supply <orders(a)crowdsupply.com> wrote: >> chadvellacott(a)sasktel.net submitted a question about your project, >> "Earth-friendly EOMA68 Computing Devices": >> ~~~~~~ > >> It looks like I only have a few hours left if I wish to order now. >> (My 3 questions are numbered below.) >> (1) Can I order, after your campaign ends in a few hours? If I had AT LEAST >> another day for deciding on purchasing, that would help me to make a wise >> decision. > > yes you can. i'll be doing a lot of preparation over the next few > weeks so you have time. > ~~~~~~ >> I am now thinking of ordering your libre "tea"-card (65.00), and the >> lap-top-kit (500.00). > > cool. > ~~~~~~ > > l. > > On 16.9.2 8:49, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote: > --- > crowd-funded eco-conscious hardware: https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68 > > > On ~, {9th month}~ 2, 2016 at 6:43 AM, <chadvellacott(a)sasktel.net> wrote: ~~~~~ >> Sorry, Luke, for the "shower" of private "e"mails today. > > that's ok - i was fine answering up to a point but then realised that > the answers i was giving would benefit a lot of other people. and > that some i had already answered (dozens of times) so other people > would be able to answer them (saving me some time). so, please > re-send them. > > l. >

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arm-netbook September 2016