This is kinda an unorganized post, so sorry for that.

Recently, I've been thinking about creating a computer in the form factor of the "Handheld PCs" that were around during the 1990s. It's mainly just for me but I wouldn't mind selling a few to the small community of nerds who like those things. I'm trying to avoid making another PC or ARM device like someone would normally do just because I'm not really a fan of either of those architectures or the monopoly they represent.

I've been considering the MIPS-compatible X2000 from the Chinese semiconductor firm Ingenic but unfortunately that chip doesn't have an external memory controller so you're limited to just the 128M/256M of DRAM in the package which is less than ideal.

So, has anyone heard of any weird chips lately? Idk where else to ask. I don't know where people who make computers discuss things like this.

(Btw if you're interested in this topic you may enjoy www.greenarraychips.com. It's Charles H. Moore's outfit, the guy who invented Forth. They make cute little chips with many independent stack machines on them. Not useful for this project but still pretty cool. This is not an ad, I just like weird computers.)

  • YearOfTheCommieDesktop [they/them]
    ·
    1 year ago

    Partly inspired by this comment I actually fixed my melty pogo pin so I could switch back to using the keyboard! It wasn't bad. I already had the pine64 replacement pins that are supposed to be a bit better, and thankfully the hole for the pin wasn't totally destroyed like the ones I've seen pictures of online, so I just gave it a nudge with a soldering iron and it settled back into its proper position/angle.

    Agreed on pine64's approach. I'm fine if they don't want to be a software company but they need to just pay some kernel developers to get hardware support done and mainlined quickly for new devices if they want them to succeed. Their model almost kinda worked for the OG pinephone, there was enough buzz and development effort to get it to a usable state, but starting over all that work from scratch for every new device with little to no investment from the company that's actually collecting the money for these things is so demoralizing. the pinephone/tab/book all just rely on one guy in czechia for the kernel support who is just hoping that if he doesn't release his source some company will contract him to do similar work for their products. and the distro situation isn't better, pretty sure the "official" ish distro for the pinetab 2 is danctnix which is just run by one very busy weeb hobbyist as far as I can tell lol

    But yeah honestly low level software and hardware stuff is mostly over my head. it's cool though, I try to always check it out when I get a chance. What do you even do on a plan 9 system? seems like it'd be hard to do anything resembling the modern web or run most applications on a system that obscure. but I also know next to nothing about it

    • PaX [comrade/them, they/them]
      ·
      1 year ago

      Partly inspired by this comment I actually fixed my melty pogo pin so I could switch back to using the keyboard!It wasn't bad. I already had the pine64 replacement pins that are supposed to be a bit better, and thankfully the hole for the pin wasn't totally destroyed like the ones I've seen pictures of online, so I just gave it a nudge with a soldering iron and it settled back into its proper position/angle.

      Glad you got it fixed! flop-pog

      Agreed on pine64's approach. I'm fine if they don't want to be a software company but they need to just pay some kernel developers to get hardware support done and mainlined quickly for new devices if they want them to succeed. Their model almost kinda worked for the OG pinephone, there was enough buzz and development effort to get it to a usable state, but starting over all that work from scratch for every new device with little to no investment from the company that's actually collecting the money for these things is so demoralizing. the pinephone/tab/book all just rely on one guy in czechia for the kernel support who is just hoping that if he doesn't release his source some company will contract him to do similar work for their products.

      Yeahh fr

      What's up with the kernel from the guy in Czechia? I knew most of the distros aren't shipping mainline kernels but it's so hard to find info online on this topic lol.

      and the distro situation isn't better, pretty sure the "official" ish distro for the pinetab 2 is danctnix which is just run by one very busy weeb hobbyist as far as I can tell lol

      lol. Yeahh, even the official distro for most of the other Pine hardware is the most freeze-gamer-pilled and mismanaged Linux project out there relative to how popular it is (Manjaro).

      But yeah honestly low level software and hardware stuff is mostly over my head. it's cool though, I try to always check it out when I get a chance. What do you even do on a plan 9 system? seems like it'd be hard to do anything resembling the modern web or run most applications on a system that obscure. but I also know next to nothing about it

      Yeah, stuff like the web requires infrastructure like web browsers that is not very portable and on the order of millions of lines of code in size. A web browser is basically like an operating system of its own these days. That being said there is a Netsurf port to 9front and virtualization support on PCs in 9front (so you can run Linux). It's a very different system and radically simpler than modern Unix or Windows. But it was designed by the people who made Unix with modern networking in mind and with the knowledge that everyone has a computer now (the word everyone used loosely). A lot of people (including me) just find it very easy and pleasing to write software for and use. You can accomplish a lot more with a lot less code. It's extremely portable too, which makes it appealing as an official OS for a new hardware platform.

      • YearOfTheCommieDesktop [they/them]
        ·
        1 year ago

        megi is the name of the kernel dev from czechia. He's put in a lot of work and he's pretty active in the matrix chats, but he's not big on upstreaming his changes and some of his side projects he doesn't even release the code... this seems like a good summary https://momi.ca/posts/2022-09-07-mainline.html

        I think he might be doing a bit of "making himself necessary" in the ecosystem of A64 based devices tbh, You can't entirely blame him but its bad for the community long term.

        Manjaro is a mess though yeah, I used it for a while since it came on the pinebook/pinephone but I had to nope out.

        Plan9 is pretty befuddling still ngl but I'm starting to like what I see. I might have to install it on a raspberry pi and see what the fuss is about

        • PaX [comrade/them, they/them]
          ·
          1 year ago

          megi is the name of the kernel dev from czechia. He's put in a lot of work and he's pretty active in the matrix chats, but he's not big on upstreaming his changes and some of his side projects he doesn't even release the code... this seems like a good summary https://momi.ca/posts/2022-09-07-mainline.html

          I think he might be doing a bit of "making himself necessary" in the ecosystem of A64 based devices tbh, You can't entirely blame him but its bad for the community long term.

          Thanks for the article! That 500k line diff from mainline is scary...

          Plan9 is pretty befuddling still ngl but I'm starting to like what I see. I might have to install it on a raspberry pi and see what the fuss is about

          Highly recommend this video to help you get around the UI: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dt3Dr3jUPjo

          Hope you have fun if you decide to try!