cheap laptop suggestions that will boot to ubuntu without hassle

[Liam Proven]

On Thu, 28 Nov 2019 at 16:43, Mike Marchywka <marchywka at hotmail.com> wrote:

>
> Actually maybe something like the raspberry PI? I guess besides cameras
> generally unattended data recording of control of simple "lab" type
> instruments. I presume many of those are USB- I think I got a digital
> multimeter with a USB port but no documentation although it
> could be reverse engineered ( maybe there was a windohs CD or something).
>
> The laptop is nice because of the battery even if many peripherals would
> stop with the line power.

Laptops will continue to power USB peripherals when the external power
goes but of course it reduces the laptop's battery life. Sometimes
substantially.

The RasPi has no on/off switch. If it's getting power, it's on. It
doesn't need a huge battery pack, but the snag is, you get no sensing
of when the mains goes so you can't do an orderly shutdown. For that
you need a UPS and that means $$$$$.

Also, RasPis have a reputation for lunching their microSD card when
they hit problems. Such as power outages.

With a Raspi 4 you can ameliorate this by only keeping /boot on the
µSD and putting / and so on on a fast USB drive, but this adds to the
cost and complexity, the RP4 needs cooling, and it has other issues.

I've actually been discussing this with a friend recently. There's
room for experimentation with a RasPi and some modern distros which
have read-only root filesystems (e.g. Fedora Silverblue, openSUSE
MicroOS, EndlessOS, ChromeOS/ChromiumOS). But most of them lack mature
(or any) RasPi support.

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