There's Talk Again About An "Open To The Core" Ubuntu Laptop

[phoronix]

Phoronix: There's Talk Again About An "Open To The Core" Ubuntu Laptop

Given the recent crowdfunding success around the Jolla Tablet, there's talk again about crowdfunding a truly open-source laptop that's running Ubuntu and would be priced around $500 USD...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTg0NTU

[GraysonPeddie]

Binary-only microcode files for hardware acceleration...

What if I decide to go the ARM route? Aren't there any ARM-based laptops with open source firmware? But then I probably won't go that route due to Steam's incompatibility with ARM.

[lkundrak]

Calling X60 a "rather an outdated piece of crap by today's hardware standards" is a rather bold statement given certain hardware standards are somehow lower today than they were at the time X60 was made. X60 was an extraordinary laptop at its time and still is very good today.

Equip it with a ssd and it's easily faster than today's laptops that for some reason still ship with rotating drives (probably "today's hardware standards" mandate that).

X60's has a 3:4 display that is easily a better fit to many workloads, especially text (program code) editing. Being of a size of an A4 notebook it fits in bags where X-line models don't. Despite its size, the keyboard is remarkably good and the layout makes sense (if you've seen the X1 with home/end at the place of a caps lock key you probably know how important is that, but maybe "today's hardware standards" say otherwise). There's a light on top od a screen that has been removed in later models (maybe to comply with "today's hardware standards"). It's batery life of ~5 hours of work is not too bad either. Not to mention the laptop body that's incredibly durable.

With coreboot it boots to GNOME in less than two seconds. Can your "today's laptop" do that?

You can get a plastic-cased netbook of the same size and half the performance for twice the size today. It might still be a good deal to get an X60 today, especially if you care about running free software (I don't think I need to explain why can it be a good idea).

[Fenrin]

there is also a campaign about a laptop you build yourself on indiegogo.
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/p...-yourself#home

it ends on 30th November. It is nice they reached the 150k$ stretch goal, so they will try to support boards like BeagleBone Black and Udoo, which makes it a bit more interesting for me.

[Calinou]

Thanks for calling the X60 a piece of crap. If I had a premium subscription, I would close it.

[veleiro]

It's also worth reminding readers that even the Free Software Foundation's first endorsed laptop is rather an outdated piece of crap by today's hardware standards especially given that it's refurbished for its price.

Idiocy proven. This is the last time I will ever reference moronix.

[plonoma]

If this laptop succeeds and provides coreboot + as little closed source firmware as possible + open source optimised drivers for the chipset, audio, usb-ports, other devices then this laptop could be a very interesting computer.

[plonoma]

Do like the GPS.
Don't see FM radio tuner or Tv tuner as very useful. With internet radio and youtube, most people use those.Furtheremore spectrum allocation is changing in many countries would a digital TV tuner really be a good addition? I'm not convinced it would.

Some extra audio ports or a more flexible card reader for more than just SD cards, maybe compact flash/other options might be more interesting.

[bpetty]

Idiocy proven. This is the last time I will ever reference moronix.

What a bunch of bitches...
I looked the specs up for that piece of crap and you are right, it is a great laptop... for 2006.

512mb of ram? Are you insaine? If you are going to quit posting because comments like that make you mad... Please, never post again. My life is too precious to read your crap. I can only justify typing this as community service.

[Luke_Wolf]

Calling X60 a "rather an outdated piece of crap by today's hardware standards" is a rather bold statement given certain hardware standards are somehow lower today than they were at the time X60 was made. X60 was an extraordinary laptop at its time and still is very good today.

Equip it with a ssd and it's easily faster than today's laptops that for some reason still ship with rotating drives (probably "today's hardware standards" mandate that).

Surely you must be joking, even if you gave it an SSD it would still be outdated crap by today's hardware standards.
I mean we're talking these processor options:

• Intel Core Duo (Yonah) 1.66 or 1.83 GHz
• Intel Core Solo (Yonah) 1.66 GHz
• Intel Core 2 Duo (Merom) 1.66/1.83 GHz (2MB Cache) or 2.0 GHz (4MB Cache)

Whereas the average laptop is running an i3 at a minimum of ~1.7GHz usually more like 2.3GHz or so with a much much faster architecture (what's it... 3x the speed at this point?) and is clocked higher.

Also 512MB or 1GB of DDR2 RAM, don't make me laugh, the standard right now is between 4-8GB of DDR3, and DDR4 is starting to hit the market, and a minimum of 4GB of RAM is basically required for modern web browsing even if we're discounting things like running Gnome or KDE, and pretty much any serious productivity software (Eclipse is ~500MB in and of itself (granted it's pretty much the heaviest IDE I'm aware of although lets also be fair in that compiling tends to consume a ton of memory too)), more is preferred.

The GPU performance isn't even worth comparing the difference is so significant, and if you want to go higher in price than baseline i3s any comparison will utterly dwarf the x60

Plus if you want 5+Hours of battery life you can find it reasonably easily as long as you're not being a cheapskate.

It may have been nice in it's time and if appropriate upgrades are done, potentially still usable today, but don't delude yourself into thinking it's any kind of performance monster.