cheap laptop suggestions that will boot to ubuntu without hassle

[Gene Heskett]

On Thursday 28 November 2019 10:51:59 Liam Proven wrote:

> 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.

That hasn't hit me yet, Liam. But I also use a minimum of a 5 amp supply 
too.

It can do a clean shutdown, where a subsequent power cycle reboots it, or 
it can, at least on the 3b's and 4b's do a clean hot reboot when running 
an armhf realtime kernel. Based on going easy on the wear leveling of a 
class 10 card, I do not run less than a 32GB card, even though only 8 to 
10 is used.  Some OS versions put a small swap file on it, which is IMO 
a no-no, beating on the cards wear leveling uselessly because 100 megs 
is about 2.5 Gigs short of what it uses to build LinuxCNC on a 2G rpi4, 
so I have setup a few gigs of swap on an ssd plugged into a usb to sata 
adapter and turn off the file. And even bigger 240GB is also plugged in 
and I do ALL of my development work on it, on the rpi4 at very near 
intel speeds for building stuff because it has usb-3.

Debian puts an arm64 kernel on the pi for buster, but I've not found it  
as stable as the raspbian armhf builds, which so far have run from power 
bump to power bump even if its months. IRQ latency is less on the 
armhf's anyway, an advantage for my LinuxCNC app.

IMO, its folks who abuse the u-sd card by using it for everything are 
giving it a bad rep, but used within its design limits it has turned out 
to be pretty bulletproof. Write to it only to install the stuff you 
need, and it won't complain. One should be aware that there is a new M$ 
file system being used on some 64GB and up u-sd's but which is not 
compatible with anything linux can offer in filesystems. SanDisk bit me 
once, 2 supposedly identical 64GB cards weren't. Very small print on the 
blister pack card of one disclosed there was a diff. IIRC one was marked 
SDHC and one was marked SDHCX. SDHC worked, even dd couldn't write to 
the SDHCX.

> 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.

Thanks for the heads up, Liam.
> --
> Liam Proven - Profile: https://about.me/liamproven
> Email: lproven at cix.co.uk - Google Mail/Hangouts/Plus:
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> 702 829 053


Cheers, Gene Heskett
-- 
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