cheap laptop suggestions that will boot to ubuntu without hassle

[Mike Marchywka]

On Thu, Nov 28, 2019 at 04:51:59PM +0100, 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 $$$$$.

When shopping for this computer, IIRC Dell had a UPS for maybe
100 dollars or less. Although I was curious if it would run
off of a car battery and charger. Apparently the adapter is 19 volts
and it can deliver 33W,

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/C1Zx4RFHliS.pdf

but no idea if it would run off of 13.8 or double that :) 

This would not be real cheap, clean, or portable but if I had
a charger and old battery swapped for preventative maintenace
on a car may not be a bad thing to do. 

> 
> 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.
> 
> -- 
> Liam Proven - Profile: https://about.me/liamproven
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-- 

mike marchywka
306 charles cox
canton GA 30115
USA, Earth 
marchywka at hotmail.com
404-788-1216
ORCID: 0000-0001-9237-455X