Utility Linux Distribution

[Eudimorphodon]

Either that, use compression, or replace the internal flash. What else did you expect?

Heh, yeah. Again, I was just being lazy and hoping that maybe someone had already pre-baked a distribution installer that combined compression techniques like those employed in the LiveCD/LiveUSB distributions to give you a "fire-and-forget" installation, but still kept it a "conventional" installation instead of something session-based like Knoppix or Puppy.

I think for laughs I'll see if I can install that Bunsenlabs Debian spin (its funky minimalist UI has been growing on me; on a low-res screen like 1366x768 it's actually pretty handy to be able to use that otherwise pretty useless Search key to launch applications and whatnot) on a compressed btrfs filesystem. If I eliminate dedicated swap a setup like that might leave the better part of eleven gigs open on the internal flash. It's a mild hassle, but... I dunno, I had to fiddle with the oldschool debian installer on the first installation anyway and it pushed the nostalgia buttons.

It's unfortunate that the internal flash is a welded down BGA chip. Some Chromebooks used M2 or MSATA because they're just seriously de-spec-ed Windows laptops, but the N42 is the "real deal". If I have to be honest, though... I kind of love these little x86 SoCs. I know by comparison to a "real" modern PC it's a flyweight, but it's actually kind of amazing that you've got one chip here that crams about the same CPU power as the most powerful dual-core system you could buy in the 2005-ish timeframe plus a video accelerator that's... pretty lame, but has some tricks up its sleeves (video decoding) into four watts of power draw.

 

[cjs]

If I eliminate dedicated swap a setup like that might leave the better part of eleven gigs open on the internal flash.

If you have 14 GB of flash, even a standard Debian install, with rubbish removed, should leave you about 12 GB free. So I'm not really seeing the issue here.

I think for laughs I'll see if I can install that Bunsenlabs Debian spin (its funky minimalist UI has been growing on me; on a low-res screen like 1366x768 it's actually pretty handy to be able to use that otherwise pretty useless Search key to launch applications and whatnot)...

It looked good enough to me that I'm contemplating trying the OpenBox window manager, though I don't know that it would really get me anything over fvwm except for the dynamic menus.

In general, if you're willing to use a fairly configurable window manager, and do the work of configuring it, you can usually save yourself some space and get something that works well everywhere, plus being conveniently customised for what you really want. My fvwm configuration, which I've been using and tweaking for decades, has been used across several OSes, several Linux distributions, several desktop systems, and gives me super-fast keyboard control of everything I do often. (Including use of various special keys—similar to your search key—for my menus and other operations.)

If I have to be honest, though... I kind of love these little x86 SoCs. I know by comparison to a "real" modern PC it's a flyweight, but it's actually kind of amazing that you've got one chip here that crams about the same CPU power as the most powerful dual-core system you could buy in the 2005-ish timeframe plus a video accelerator that's... pretty lame, but has some tricks up its sleeves (video decoding) into four watts of power draw.

Yeah, these are great. I was somewhat into them for a while especially because of the amazing battery life, but I can't live without a TrackPoint, so that's what's kept me mainly on Lenovo laptops for the last twenty-odd years.

 

[Eudimorphodon]

If you have 14 GB of flash, even a standard Debian install, with rubbish removed, should leave you about 12 GB free. So I'm not really seeing the issue here.

This all probably boils down to a complaint about how fatty Ubuntu is, even the so-called "light" variants. It's just been my habit for years to default to them because, you know, taking up ten gigs in a default install usually isn't a big deal these days. TL;DR, when an Ubuntu variant says "light" they mean "less eye candy/CPU load" light, disk space seems like it's almost constant whether it's Lubuntu or Kubuntu. (Basically the opposite ends of the "light" scale.)

Yeah, these are great. I was somewhat into them for a while especially because of the amazing battery life, but I can't live without a TrackPoint, so that's what's kept me mainly on Lenovo laptops for the last twenty-odd years.

It definitely would have been nice if they'd stuck trackpoints in their Chromebooks; the touchpads on these things are pretty bad.

The main thing rekindling my interest in these things is the realization that they're neigh indestructible. They're made out of plastic that reminds me of a car interior and despite being covered with dings and scratches from living a rough elementary school existence for *years* they both work fine. If you need a disposable laptop to drag out into the wild or schlep to a datacenter these things seem *very* optimized for those kind of jobs; they're the Rubbermaid garbage cans of laptops.

On the mentioned machine with 2 GB flash, I ended up installing Windows XP on a 4 GB SD card. Graphics driver support for the VIA-based GPU is better, and the OS copes better with the tiny 800x480 resolution.

What kind of laptop was it? It sounds very related to the "Linux Edition" HP 2133 Mini-Note I made the mistake of buying during that Netbook craze back in 2008. That came with a 4GB "SSD" that was a naked circuit board with a few memory ICs and a SATA connector stuck in the drive bay.

Coincidentally enough that machine also eventually ended up with Windows XP on it. (It is probably the last machine I ever installed XP on, come to think of it.) The Linux drivers for the GPU in that thing were a horrifying dumpster fire; there were two completely different sets of drivers and both had serious functionality trade-offs. I did swap out that lame 4GB psuedo-SSD for a normal SATA SSD first, however. (A whopping 32GB one. This was pretty early days for those.)

I probably still have that weird 4GB SATA board in a box somewhere. Really should figure out some completely pointless application for it.

 

[Al Kossow]

This is the ultimate WTF product

GPD Micro PC - GPD | PC Gaming Handhelds & Mini Laptops

Tailored for IT Professionals Intel Chipset N4120 Windows 10 Pro RS-232 Serial Port Dual-Band Wi-Fi & 1 Gigabit RJ45 Port

gpdstore.net

$400 to get a DB-9 serial port?

 

[Eudimorphodon]

This is the ultimate WTF product

GPD Micro PC - GPD | PC Gaming Handhelds & Mini Laptops

Tailored for IT Professionals Intel Chipset N4120 Windows 10 Pro RS-232 Serial Port Dual-Band Wi-Fi & 1 Gigabit RJ45 Port

gpdstore.net

$400 to get a DB-9 serial port?

It's cute?

I'd probably just get a dongle or bluetooth serial dingus for my phone if I really wanted a way to do serial consoles with maximum portability and no regard for actually having a usable keyboard.

 

[Svenska]

What kind of laptop was it? It sounds very related to the "Linux Edition" HP 2133 Mini-Note I made the mistake of buying during that Netbook craze back in 2008. That came with a 4GB "SSD" that was a naked circuit board with a few memory ICs and a SATA connector stuck in the drive bay.

It was a One A110, contemporary with the very first Eee PC and a lot cheaper. I don't know what the "SSD" was, but likely just a raw NAND plus IDE bridge chip. Random read/write access speed was below 100 KB/s (linear accesses were somewhat faster), which made squashfs even more useful. Less data to read, faster system. It served me well for a very long time.

 

[Eudimorphodon]

It was a One A110, contemporary with the very first Eee PC and a lot cheaper. I don't know what the "SSD" was, but likely just a raw NAND plus IDE bridge chip. Random read/write access speed was below 100 KB/s (linear accesses were somewhat faster), which made squashfs even more useful. Less data to read, faster system. It served me well for a very long time.

Oh yeah, almost exactly the same guts as the HP I had. The HP used a version of the chipset that had separate North/Southbridge components, which is why it had SATA, but all the sound/video components are the same. The HP had a gem of a 1280x768 screen, which is why I bought it instead of one of those Atom netbooks with the 1024x600 resolution, but in retrospect, bad call.

 

[GiGaBiTe]

This is the ultimate WTF product

GPD Micro PC - GPD | PC Gaming Handhelds & Mini Laptops

Tailored for IT Professionals Intel Chipset N4120 Windows 10 Pro RS-232 Serial Port Dual-Band Wi-Fi & 1 Gigabit RJ45 Port

gpdstore.net

$400 to get a DB-9 serial port?

At first I thought that maybe they were marking up crap from Ali Express, but nope. They're nearly $400 there too, and they're "on sale". The regular price is shown to be nearly $800.

Whoever made those things and thinks someone will pay $800 for chineseium wofat is smoking some strong stuff.

 

[doshea]

In general, if you're willing to use a fairly configurable window manager, and do the work of configuring it, you can usually save yourself some space and get something that works well everywhere, plus being conveniently customised for what you really want. My fvwm configuration, which I've been using and tweaking for decades, has been used across several OSes, several Linux distributions, several desktop systems, and gives me super-fast keyboard control of everything I do often. (Including use of various special keys—similar to your search key—for my menus and other operations.)

I occasionally use fvwm still on old machines or virtual machines, but my concern with using it more modern machines or recommending it to anyone else is that I have no idea how you could get it to pop up a thing saying "it looks like you plugged in a USB storage device, would you like to mount it?", a menu to click on to unmount it again, etc. I can run mount and umount, but can't always remember how to deal with encrypted storage, and for less experienced users, the regular mounting could be painful on the command line too. Is there a nice solution for fvwm? I managed to get a little Tcl/Tk script to display a button in an fvwm panel (or whatever it's called) before so I presume it doesn't necessarily have to be fvwm-specific.

 

[cjs]

This all probably boils down to a complaint about how fatty Ubuntu is....

Yeah, true enough. Ubuntu always takes Debian and piles a ton of crap on top of it, which is why I switched away from it. But even there, you can simply start removing packages until you're down to whatever size suits you.

I occasionally use fvwm still on old machines or virtual machines, but my concern with using it more modern machines or recommending it to anyone else is that I have no idea how you could get it to pop up a thing saying "it looks like you plugged in a USB storage device, would you like to mount it?"....

I'm pretty sure that's nothing to do with the window manager; it's certainly not a window manager's job to handle anything like that. You just need to find whatever program is doing that, and run it along with your WM.

I do this for my panel (the button/icon/etc. bar that runs, among other things, the notification area), just running xfce4-panel as part of my startup. (Note that that's not the same thing as FVWM's panel.)

 

[Zare]

At first I thought that maybe they were marking up crap from Ali Express, but nope. They're nearly $400 there too, and they're "on sale". The regular price is shown to be nearly $800.

Whoever made those things and thinks someone will pay $800 for chineseium wofat is smoking some strong stuff.

Outrageous, they have this GPD for about $720 on Black Friday sale.

I bought mini router PC from Ali for $220 with similar or same hardware. $500 for a small screen, battery and a crap keyboard lmao

Whatever happened to the "netbook", did tablets kill them off? Clearly someone thinks people are paying $800 for a netbook with serial port.

I occasionally use fvwm still on old machines or virtual machines, but my concern with using it more modern machines or recommending it to anyone else is that I have no idea how you could get it to pop up a thing saying "it looks like you plugged in a USB storage device, would you like to mount it?", a menu to click on to unmount it again, etc. I can run mount and umount, but can't always remember how to deal with encrypted storage, and for less experienced users, the regular mounting could be painful on the command line too. Is there a nice solution for fvwm? I managed to get a little Tcl/Tk script to display a button in an fvwm panel (or whatever it's called) before so I presume it doesn't necessarily have to be fvwm-specific.

For this exact reason I've ran GNOME2 and later Mate session-daemon beside WindowMaker.
Window managers handle only X11. Sure they won't help you around OS things such as devices, but they won't help you with Freedesktop stuff such as file associations either.

(There was also a great GTK2-GNUstep theme that unified the look of WM and GTK2 apps)

This was my work driver 15 years ago, on a Toshiba Satellite, P4 2GHz/1GB RAM.

So you can try executing mate-session-daemon detached from .xinitrc or wherever, before FVWM runs.

Yeah, true enough. Ubuntu always takes Debian and piles a ton of crap on top of it, which is why I switched away from it. But even there, you can simply start removing packages until you're down to whatever size suits you.

I always disliked Ubuntu and will always argue against it...on the other hand it was the only distro that could run wifi on a cheap 2010 netbook that I wanted to run just out of the box, no messing with drivers, just install run and use it ocassionaly while I'm working in outside environment.
But since then a lot of things went south, especially their phoning back home stuff.

 

[Al Kossow]

Whatever happened to the "netbook", did tablets kill them off? Clearly someone thinks people are paying $800 for a netbook with serial port.

yup. killed by iPad wannabes
products mutated into tablets that attach to keyboard docks, with all the annoying small cable connectors on the tablet.

I've been down a fairly expensive rathole trying to build a portable serial terminal out of a small x86 or ARM netbook.
I've learned a lot about the market. It's all crap with low resolution displays and unusable keyboards with normal
sized male hands. The ARM products are all Android with barely any open-source support because they all use
undocumented SOCs

It isn't clear if that serial port is a real 16550 lpc or usb.
I tried buying one of the "deal" 6" units with a serial port, and the seller was a Aliexpress scam. I'm trying to get
my money back now.
With a real 16550 you could in theory use DOS terminal emulators. USB serial support in DOS doesn't really exist.
I may try a stripped down Linux with as little of a screen interface possible so you could get something running
that has just the terminal emulation visible on the tiny resolution (1024x700) these LCDs have.

The Acer Apire One has a path to the LPC interface, there are LPC 16550 uarts and I bought all of the parts to
build a real rs232 port for one, then I made the mistake of thinking I could get one of the 6" units for $250

That is also why thin clients are pretty uninteresting. They started out as something that booted DOS (or even Linux)
and mutated into things that only wanted to talk Microsoft terminal server protocol.

 

[cjs]

I may try a stripped down Linux with as little of a screen interface possible so you could get something running
that has just the terminal emulation visible on the tiny resolution (1024x700) these LCDs have.

You probably already know and meant this, but didn't mention it directly so just in case:

Linux of course has a console interface, which is actually the primary interface on virtually all Linux systems. (X11 is brought up well after boot, usually on the Alt-F7 or Ctrl-Alt-F7 virtual console, and most systems will leave the text consoles on Alt-F1 through Alt-F6 up and running at a login prompt.)

If you are good with using just that, then you can save yourself piles of disk space by leaving X11 etc. out of your installation. You should be able to build a quite capable system in a few hundred megabytes, or even less.

For a portable serial terminal I certainly wouldn't worry about any kind of unusual hardware; I'd just buy some standard netbook-ish/PC-ish thing, stick a stripped-down Linux on it (per above), and use as many USB serial adapters as I need.

 

[Svenska]

products mutated into tablets that attach to keyboard docks, with all the annoying small cable connectors on the tablet.

Although they use Bluetooth to connect to the usual things (keyboard, mouse, headphones) by now, removing the need for cables. Needs charging of all components, but at least battery lifetime has become decent enough to not be a problem anymore.

It's all crap with low resolution displays and unusable keyboards with normal sized male hands.

Asian hands are smaller. You are not the target audience.

The ARM products are all Android with barely any open-source support because they all use undocumented SOCs

That is, unfortunately, true. Although things are (slowly) improving, Google keeps tightening vendor freedom for Android devices. The GKI (Generic Kernel Image) for example forces vendors to implement most drivers through kernel modules rather than patching the kernel innards. Linux also tends to change their internal interfaces a lot, making upstreaming support the superior long-term strategy - and the EU enforcing long-term support for common devices (and large parts of the world following) requires having a long-term strategy.

I was hoping that RISC-V would also make things better. Instead, we got ACPI and UEFI on RISC-V, so unfortunately that's also a lost cause.

 

[Eudimorphodon]

For a portable serial terminal I certainly wouldn't worry about any kind of unusual hardware; I'd just buy some standard netbook-ish/PC-ish thing, stick a stripped-down Linux on it (per above), and use as many USB serial adapters as I need.

For tasks like this that’s a big plus of Chromebooks; they’re all built with a five year expiration date on official OS updates, and so far as the school districts which buy tons of them are concerned they’re worthless when they hit it. Like I said, my kid got the two I have for free at a giveaway at the local district office. (Completely free, limit two per family, and FWIW I didn’t see them carding anyone at this particular event.)

Almost all x86 ones can be flashed with open source UEFI firmware (which also includes SeaBIOS as a payload for booting legacy OSes) just by “unlocking” them by unscrewing a screw, pulling a jumper, or other trivial measure. They usually have pretty mediocre screens (think of laptop screens circa 2000 or so, but with LED instead of CCFL lighting) and the keyboards aren’t *great*, but they’re full size and tough enough to take being thrown around by kids for five years. An 11” screen model is probably a much better choice for a portable serial terminal than any novelty 6” thing.

 

[Eudimorphodon]

So...

I think for laughs I'll see if I can install that Bunsenlabs Debian spin (its funky minimalist UI has been growing on me; on a low-res screen like 1366x768 it's actually pretty handy to be able to use that otherwise pretty useless Search key to launch applications and whatnot) on a compressed btrfs filesystem.

Went ahead and fiddled with this today; there were a few gotchas, because it at least appeared that you need to have a separate ext4 /boot partition, which offsets some of the gain of compressing the rest of it, and there also wasn't really the opportunity to add the compress mount option before the install, which means that it initially went in uncompressed. (Maybe I could have manually edited fstab with the advanced installer, or opened a shell and hacked it.) In any case, after enabling compression *before* doing updates and running a defrag to force it to rewrite some things it's now saying it's fitting 5.1G of data into 3.8G of space. So... good enough for government work, I guess. Also added flash-friendly optimizations like noatime while I was at it, of course.

(It was actually sort of surreal running compsize a few times while the apt-get upgrade ran in another window; the physical disk space used went *down* as the uncompressed outdated software was replaced. Fun stuff.)

One sad thing I did run into. I could have swore that I'd read that the replacement firmware for this Chromebook included a SeaBIOS payload for booting legacy OSes, so just for laughs I downloaded a FreeDOS installer to see if I could do the dumbest thing ever and have a bare-metal DOS boot partition on it. Unfortunately, no, it turns out that at least this particularly Chromebook doesn't have a functional legacy boot payload available, so if it's not UFI64 compatible I'm not booting it. Guess that renders the argument about 32 bit moot.

I wonder if those dinky little micro-PCs like the one @Al Kossow was looking at actually have functional legacy boot, or putting DOS on them is likewise a pipe dream

 

[Perico]

If you need a disposable laptop to drag out into the wild or schlep to a datacenter these things seem *very* optimized for those kind of jobs

I can see the dragging it into the wild thing, but into a datacenter? Without an RJ45 port, this nice little disposable machines are useless in a datacenter.

I do have a Lenovo Ideapad 100S, 1.1 kg, 2 GB RAM, 32 GB eMMC "hard disk", and well... it runs Windows 10 x86 in de-bloated mode well enough to watch a random youtube video and to crack open up to four tabs in Google Chrome. BUT, it only has wifi networking. Its like a tablet, but with a physical keyboard. Battery life is amazing, though.

 

[Svenska]

Without an RJ45 port, this nice little disposable machines are useless in a datacenter.

USB ethernet adapters should work well enough. We've even used them on some Android phones.

 

[Perico]

USB ethernet adapters should work well enough. We've even used them on some Android phones.

Then just use a regular RJ45-fitted laptop, and avoid having to worry about carrying "accessories".

 

[Eudimorphodon]

Then just use a regular RJ45-fitted laptop, and avoid having to worry about carrying "accessories".

Unless you’re sporting a laptop from before 2006 you’re carrying a dongle for serial console anyway. (Also, it’s not like wired Ethernet is omnipresent in “real laptops” anymore. Apple hasn’t had it in ages.)