Hardware With GNU/Linux: Debian on Walmart Motile M142, $199 Pinebook Pro ARM Laptop, Raspberry Pi and More



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New laptop: Walmart Motile M142
Then, while at FOSDEM I saw an article in Phoronix about a $200 Ryzen 3 (the M141) from Walmart. It looked like it would end up similar in performance to the E7240, but with a bit better battery life and for $200 it was well worth a shot (luckily I already had a work trip to the US planned for the middle of February, and the office is near a Walmart). Unfortunately I decided to sleep on it and when I woke up the price had jumped to $279. Not quite as appealing, but looking around their site I saw a Ryzen 5 variant (the M142) going for $400. It featured a Ryzen 5 3500U, which means 4 cores (8 threads), which was a much nicer boost over my i5. Plus AMD instead of Intel removes a whole set of the speculative execution issues that are going around. So I ordered one. And then it got cancelled a couple of days later because they claimed they couldn’t take payment. So I tried again, and that seemed to work. Total cost including taxes etc was about $440 (or £350 in real money).
Base spec as shipped is Ryzen 5 3500U, 8G RAM + 256G SATA m.2 SSD. Provided OS is Windows 10 Home. I managed to get it near the start of my US trip, and I’d brought a USB stick with the Debian installer on it, so I decided to reinstall. Sadly the Buster installer didn’t work - booted fine but the hardware discovery part took ages and generally seemed unhappy. I took the easy option and grabbed the Bullseye Alpha 1 netinst image instead (I run testing on my personal laptop, so this is what I was going to end up with). That worked fine (including, impressively, just working on the hotel wifi but I think that was partly because doing the T+Cs acceptance under Windows was remembered so I didn’t have to do it again to get routed access for the installer). I did need to manually install firmware-amd-graphics to make X happy, but everything else was smooth and I was able to use the laptop in the evenings for the rest of my trip.
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The $199 Pinebook Pro ARM Laptop Is Closer To Running On The Mainline Linux Kernel
While the Pinebook Pro is happily running various Linux distributions and BSDs, this 14-inch ARMv8 laptop doesn't yet have mainline kernel support for lack of the DeviceTree bits. But Tobias Schramm of the Manjaro camp on Friday sent out the latest patches adding support for the Pinebook Pro. The patches provide the needed DTS bindings for this Rockchip powered laptop.
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Raspberry Jams around the world celebrate Raspberry Pi’s 8th birthday
Happy birthday to us: tomorrow marks the eighth birthday of the Raspberry Pi computer!
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Apollo Lake Mini-ITX board has thin profile
Winmate’s “IP70” is an industrial thin Mini-ITX board with an Apollo Lake Pentium N4200 plus up to 8GB DDR3L, 2x GbE, 2x SATA, 2x M.2, 4x USB 3.0, DP, HDMI, and -20 to 60°C support.
Winmate has posted details on a “new” low-profile Mini-ITX board with an Intel Apollo Lake SoC and a -20 to 60°C range. No OS support is listed for the IP70, but the company’s Apollo Lake based EAC Mini EACIL22S runs Linux and Windows.
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Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2 5G VR Reference Design Comes with Dual 2Kx2K Display, Up to 7 Cameras
Qualcomm Snapdragon XR1 was the first processor from the company dedicated to extended reality (XR) and virtual reality (VR) applications. It found its way in various hardware development kits, a well as Google Glass Enterprise Edition v2.
We missed the company’s announcement of the Snapdragon XR2 platform with 5G support last December, but Qualcomm has now just unveiled the Snapdragon XR2 5G Reference Design to help OEMs shorten time to market.
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Semtech LoRa Edge Uses LR1110 Single Chip with LoRa, WiFi, and GNSS
Semtech, a leader in LoRa and RF technology, is continuing its support for the LoRa ecosystem with the launch of a new portfolio of solutions called LoRa Edge to simplify and accelerate IoT applications for the Edge.
LoRa Edge is a new highly versatile and low power software-defined LoRa-based platform that will enable a wide portfolio of applications for indoor and outdoor asset management, targeting industrial, building, home, agriculture, transportation, and logistics markets.
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