@Ympker said:
+1 for Chromebook. Mine has incredible battery life, is snappy and fast, has Linux container built-in (debian; enable easily), is quiet (fan-less) and can be charged with USB-C. Light-weigth, great wifi chip. Cost me like 130€. I've got an Acer CB-315.
Light. Battery life is fantastic. It has a hackable firmware, so you can easily install *nix if you want (I did). Uses the classic "big jack" (7.4mm diameter) Dell power adapters.
Buy 2 (or 4), and have a backup ready to rage. Lowend af.
does the lack of Super key annoy you in any way?
Aye. I could never use this keyboard for daily activities. The other big downside is that the "power" button is where "backspace" should be. I highly recommend re-mapping that nonsense.
Can you show me what power adapter would be suitable for this Chromebook? The listing doesn't come with one I realize.
@Ympker said:
+1 for Chromebook. Mine has incredible battery life, is snappy and fast, has Linux container built-in (debian; enable easily), is quiet (fan-less) and can be charged with USB-C. Light-weigth, great wifi chip. Cost me like 130€. I've got an Acer CB-315.
Lenovo Duet 5 Chromebook with 8 GB RAM and 128 GB disk was $100 off for Black Friday at Best Buy, $399 instead of $499. Still too expensive! But maybe worth it because of very wonderful OLED touchscreen. Also it's aarm64 so I can run Xv6 on it a biit more easily. Shipping took a long time. I've had it a couple of weeks now. One big difference is main filesystem now mounted read only. Even /usr/local is read only. It used to be that whatever you put in /usr/local survived OS reloads and powerwashes when switching Developer Mode on and off. Maybe it still does, but I haven't yet tried switching /usr/local back to writeable. Seems fast and well made overall. Excellent battery life. @terrorgen Works great for ssh! Can use ChromeOS ssh client or (I believe) any Android ssh app. Friendly greetings from Sonora!
Sounds good, but personally, anything above 300€ I'd get a "regular" Windows/FreeDOS laptop. Chromebooks are great for what they do, but also for their competitive browsing. I'm sure they have and will continue to improve a lot, but for me not worth spending more than 300€ on it now. Just my two cents though. OLED and touch sound great though. I'm sure you'll have fun
@AlwaysSkint said:
That's pretty good! I wonder how heavy it is - I may Google it.
I bought the cheapest Dell laptop I could find a few years ago prior to travelling in China for a couple of months. In part, because I wanted to not care at all about having it stolen and/or lost, but also to get a completely fresh machine as I didn't want any risk of accidentally leaking any important authentication tokens/passwords, and I wanted a machine that I knew I wouldn't particularly want to use when I was back home in case it got filled with malware (who knows what random malware might get injected into web pages on unknown networks).
I found something for just over £100, even included a Windows licence and CD drive, but that thing was so heavy at well over 1kg. So, while it did fulfil its purpose, I never took it out of my hotel room and I've never wanted to lug it on holiday anywhere else since. It was also horrifically slow, but fine for price and doing only very basic tasks and it was incredibly useful having a real computer so I could backup photos, videos and Garmin GPS logs (I was doing a lot of walking in scenic places and up mountains), and also for making an additional copy onto an external drive in case the laptop was lost.
So, overall, I'd recommend a cheap laptop solution, but mostly because it can be considered throwaway. The weight can be a real nuisance though.
I used E4200 laptops for years, before the current Toshiba Z930. Lightweight & generally very reliable: old DualCore though.
Yeah, my main laptop is a Dell XPS 13 from 2015. Has the amazing high DPI touchscreen and it's pretty light. I also now have a MacBook Air M1 for work, and it's the same form factor. It's actually quite handy that they both fit into the same carry case.
It's actually quite weird how the prices on this range have gone though. When I bought this in 2015, when the new model was just launched, it cost £1000. The updated version available now has a much better CPU and more memory, but for the model with the same screen it's over £1500 now.
Light. Battery life is fantastic. It has a hackable firmware, so you can easily install *nix if you want (I did). Uses the classic "big jack" (7.4mm diameter) Dell power adapters.
Buy 2 (or 4), and have a backup ready to rage. Lowend af.
I installed Ubuntu SERVER (so I could build my own DE) ...so below addresses some of the needed steps to have everything functional with Ubuntu Server install...
Profit.
The rest of my gibberish notes:
"
Now, how to get sound & touchpad working in LXDE & OpenBox….
How to get touchpad working in LXDE & OpenBox…..
create a file: /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/30-touchpad.conf
Section "InputClass"
Identifier "Elan Touchpad"
Driver "libinput"
MatchIsTouchpad "on"
Option "Tapping" "on"
Option "NaturalScrolling" "true"
Option "ClickMethod" "clickfinger"
EndSection
*I deleted the last line: - Option "ClickMethod" "clickfinger" - after I discovered that it disabled the right-click button. Some of those options/variables/names/values are a bit cryptic: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/libinput
Oh, thinking about it, somewhere I have one of the original Asus Aspire EEE things. I guess it must be in the house somewhere, but I've not seen it for about a decade!
@ralf said:
Oh, thinking about it, somewhere I have one of the original Asus Aspire EEE things. I guess it must be in the house somewhere, but I've not seen it for about a decade!
I traveled all around Asia for a year with an Aspire One about a decade ago. Had Ubuntu 10.04 running so nice on it with XFCE. I miss that little machine, it was perfect for me then.
Just want to provide a closure for those who have helped.
I got a Dell Chromebook 11 for $30-ish without the charger as i have a few lying around, install UEFI from mrchromebox and installed Linux.
Cute little machine with 8-9 hour battery life.
Did not regret the purchase.
Thanks guys!
Comments
Amazon is asking $235. Pirates!
The all seeing eye sees everything...
Dell makes at least 6 different adapters of at least 4 different wattages that I know of (all 19.5V, which is all that matters) that work with that Chromebook. That Chromebook, from factory, comes with a 45W adapter. You can use the 45W, 65W, 90W, or 130W adapters. ANY Dell big barrel (big end/jack of 7.4mm) of those wattages will work. Most IT nuts (or computer shops) will probably give you one from their box. The Dell 65W & 90W adapters are some of the most common (and longest lasting) laptop adapters in North America.
Examples:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/234841949246
https://www.ebay.com/itm/354490570287
https://www.walmart.com/ip/Dell-Chromebook-11-Regulatory-Model-P22T-65W-Genuine-Original-OEM-Laptop-Charger-AC-Adapter-Power-Cord/314825940
Here you can see one such (3rd party) adapter for sale. Notice it has the big jack and an adapter to neck it down to Dell's modern small tip:
https://www.amazon.com/Powseed-Replacement-Chromebook-Inspiron-Latitude/dp/B0784FK71L/
Sounds good, but personally, anything above 300€ I'd get a "regular" Windows/FreeDOS laptop. Chromebooks are great for what they do, but also for their competitive browsing. I'm sure they have and will continue to improve a lot, but for me not worth spending more than 300€ on it now. Just my two cents though. OLED and touch sound great though. I'm sure you'll have fun
Ympker's VPN LTD Comparison, Uptime.is, Ympker's GitHub.
I bought the cheapest Dell laptop I could find a few years ago prior to travelling in China for a couple of months. In part, because I wanted to not care at all about having it stolen and/or lost, but also to get a completely fresh machine as I didn't want any risk of accidentally leaking any important authentication tokens/passwords, and I wanted a machine that I knew I wouldn't particularly want to use when I was back home in case it got filled with malware (who knows what random malware might get injected into web pages on unknown networks).
I found something for just over £100, even included a Windows licence and CD drive, but that thing was so heavy at well over 1kg. So, while it did fulfil its purpose, I never took it out of my hotel room and I've never wanted to lug it on holiday anywhere else since. It was also horrifically slow, but fine for price and doing only very basic tasks and it was incredibly useful having a real computer so I could backup photos, videos and Garmin GPS logs (I was doing a lot of walking in scenic places and up mountains), and also for making an additional copy onto an external drive in case the laptop was lost.
So, overall, I'd recommend a cheap laptop solution, but mostly because it can be considered throwaway. The weight can be a real nuisance though.
I used E4200 laptops for years, before the current Toshiba Z930. Lightweight & generally very reliable: old DualCore though.
It wisnae me! A big boy done it and ran away.
NVMe2G for life! until death (the end is nigh)
Yeah, my main laptop is a Dell XPS 13 from 2015. Has the amazing high DPI touchscreen and it's pretty light. I also now have a MacBook Air M1 for work, and it's the same form factor. It's actually quite handy that they both fit into the same carry case.
It's actually quite weird how the prices on this range have gone though. When I bought this in 2015, when the new model was just launched, it cost £1000. The updated version available now has a much better CPU and more memory, but for the model with the same screen it's over £1500 now.
Just for fun
I’m using crouton right now. Might be better to install directly on the hardware… 🤔
@hornet how did you install Linux?
The rest of my gibberish notes:
"
Now, how to get sound & touchpad working in LXDE & OpenBox….
How to get touchpad working in LXDE & OpenBox…..
create a file: /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/30-touchpad.conf
Section "InputClass"
Identifier "Elan Touchpad"
Driver "libinput"
MatchIsTouchpad "on"
Option "Tapping" "on"
Option "NaturalScrolling" "true"
Option "ClickMethod" "clickfinger"
EndSection
*I deleted the last line: - Option "ClickMethod" "clickfinger" - after I discovered that it disabled the right-click button. Some of those options/variables/names/values are a bit cryptic: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/libinput
Sound:
alsa-base/alsa.conf not needed. Just the SOF bin thing: sof-bin-v2.2
https://github.com/thesofproject/sof-bin/releases
More:
Papirus icon theme
Install SUDO, rsync, Firefox-ESR, nm-tray (that it?), lxappearance, Leafpad, Xarchiver, VLC
"
Oh, thinking about it, somewhere I have one of the original Asus Aspire EEE things. I guess it must be in the house somewhere, but I've not seen it for about a decade!
I traveled all around Asia for a year with an Aspire One about a decade ago. Had Ubuntu 10.04 running so nice on it with XFCE. I miss that little machine, it was perfect for me then.
To keep it short, buy compact foldable keyboard and connect to your phone.
Just want to provide a closure for those who have helped.
I got a Dell Chromebook 11 for $30-ish without the charger as i have a few lying around, install UEFI from mrchromebox and installed Linux.
Cute little machine with 8-9 hour battery life.
Did not regret the purchase.
Thanks guys!
The all seeing eye sees everything...