Rolling Your Own Laptop?

rneches asks: "I've been looking around for a Linux friendly laptop, and I've found a couple of reasonable systems. However, there really aren't any laptops out there that really meet the needs of a Linux user. In particular, most laptops are, more or less, desktop replacements. As such, they are loaded with scads of nifty features, beefy processors, and so forth. This is great, I suppose, if you are running Windows or MacOS and want a desktop replacement. If you're a Linux user, and spend most of your time in emacs windows (er, frames), most of that fancy stuff is more of a liability than an asset. In other words, I'm talking about coders, admins and other Linux hackers more than I'm talking about the 'average user'." In short, rneches is looking to find a way to build his own laptop, and if the platform doesn't exist to be able to do this, he's looking for help in creating one. Interested?

"From a laptop, I want five things:

• A nice, clear screen. Color is nice, but not critical. It should be big enough so that looking at it doesn't make me feel like I'm stuck in the coach section of a DC-9.
• Decent 2D video performance. I might just be editing text, but at least it should look good while doing it. In any event, with decent a framebuffer and hardware acceleration, I can use nice anti-aliases fonts and play around with the window settings. This might sound frivolous, but nice-looking text and windows go a long, long way to relive eyestrain, which is exceedingly important.
• Good physical utility. Too many laptops seem to be designed to sit on your desk, with the occasional trip to some other desk (transported in a deluxe, custom leather briefcase). This is OK if you are, say, the CEO, and don't do any real work in the first place. I want a laptop that is durable, light and small. I don't want to have to transport it in a special bag, or worry about fragile bits getting broken from normal use.
• Insanely long battery life. I don't mean 'barely survive the flight from NWK to LAX'. I mean 'I'm only going to be in Tokyo for a week, so I won't need the AC adapter.'
• Good built-in networking. No PCMCIA stuff, dongles, or other junk. The system should have a respected 100base-T card built in, and probably an 802.11b card and high-gain antenna as well.

If it can do that, I don't care all that much about CPU speed, disk storage, CD-ROM or DVD drives, USB, FireWire, IrDA or integrated late makers. Oh, and it needs to run Linux, or at least OpenBSD or NetBSD. So, basically, I want a tough little system with a StrongARM CPU, a flash disk and grayscale 1024x768 LCD. Insofar as I can tell, no one makes such a thing.

Which brings me to my point - Is it possible to roll your own laptop? I've looked at pc104 systems that might do the job for a base, and flash disks that would be great for storage and battery life, but the video, screen and enclosure are all somewhat of a mystery to me. I've taken apart Dells and (shudder) Sonys, and the video hardware is completely non-standard and funky. Each major brand of LCD has a different connector, and require a special (as in, not your average VGA compatible card) hardware to drive them. I'm not sure where I'd get a decent PS/2 keyboard that would be appropriate for a laptop. And as for the case itself - well, I'd probably need take out some life insurance, and then get in touch with those folks from the /. story a few months back about making storm trooper costumes from vacuum molded PVC.

I know this sounds like something of an absurd project, but then again, there once was a day when building a desktop PC was an absurd project. The pc104 standard seems like a pretty good standard to use in the same way desktop system use AT and ATX. Most of the pc104 boards are intended for ultra low power embedded systems, but there's no reason I can see that beefier chips couldn't be used. You'd have to give up the spiffy ZIF sockets, but laptops aren't really that upgradable anyway. Chances are, there's already a pc104 board that will do just about anything you want at very low power consumption. You could cram two or three pc104 boards into a really thin laptop (side by side, not stacked).

If someone started making pc104 video cards that could drive a host of different LCD screens, that would help a lot too. And, of course, someone would have to make some decent cases.

Is there anyone out there who's tried this? Any successes, I hope?

If I actually did go out and build my own laptop, do you think there would be enough general interest to get a community together? Maybe even start a little company to sell pc104 compatible laptop shells and the various adapters, trackpads, keyboards and other doodads that people would need?"

Comments

Pointless...

[tweakt]

This is dumb. You'll end up paying three times as much to develop this thing. Just go buy an ultraportable, like the Thinkpad X22... no drives built in, weighs barely anything... runs anything you want, and hell, you can even get it with linux pre-installed.

Re:Pointless...

[walt-sjc]

Only 3 times as much??? Not hardly. Try 1000 times.

I have the X20 (and a T21, and Sony Vaio PCG-F450) which is a slightly older version of the X22. Awesome little box. Small, Farily good battery life (requestors battery desires are TOTALLY impossible today, maybe when fuel cells are availbale....), networking, modem, etc. This box also has the add-on base for when you DO want drives, speakers, etc. and works with the newer version of IBM's docking stations (compatible with the T series.)

Runs Linux nicely. Throw in a 802.11b card and you are set.To get the machine this person wants to build would cost millions in R&D meaning the first few off the assembly line would be WAY spendy (market for this thing would be on the order of hundreds...)

Think things like cases, custom motherboards, keyboard, etc. Costs for the molds to make the case alone would run a good $200K. Cases like the IBM's made from composite's are VERY VERY expensive to have a line setup to produce. Now you could probably build a prototype the size of a desktop for a few thousand, but getting it small in one package is a whole different ball game.

This idea seems to come from someone who really has no concept of the costs or issues involved with building a hardware product. Oh yeah, if you actually wanted to SELL one of these things, you need to get the product certified with multiple different agencies (gets worse for overseas.)

Re:Pointless...

[billcopc]

I would very much like to see a Thinkpad that can stretch its batteries longer than 5 hours. I used to have an X24 for the exact same uses the story poster has in mind, just doing Perl/PHP/C development and occasionally playing a few mp3's in my car (though the sound chip is sucky).

Its life always oscillated between 3-5 hours, most likely because the Pentium-3 was constantly running full-tilt, even though the thing was spending most of its time idling for input. For most purposes, aggressively throttling a fast cpu down to a minuscule duty cycle would work just fine while extending battery life at least 500%, yet you would still have some crunching power available if you really needed it. Let it run at 33mhz while I futz with the text editor, then kick it up to 1.0g when gcc fires up. That flaky Intel Speedstep stuff already does some throttling but it is very lax, even when set to "extend battery life". Perhaps if they added a "zombie mode" to run it at 1/20th of its rated mhz, it would still be plenty fast for the mundane coding binges we've been doing since the dark ages of the Apple II.

Re:Pointless...

[Anonymous Coward]

radio shack model 100 - best laptop EVER. two weeks of battery life, and fucking unbreakable... with full-sized keys.

Battery life vs...

[Mike Connell]

Maybe considering that you want really really good battery life, you should consider stipping yet more out of the specification.

I was wondering if, as an emacs user, you could cope with a real text-only display - just like a text mode console. Surely the lack of video RAM, bandwidth etc should save some power?

Uh.

[TheKodiak]

"I know this sounds like something of an absurd project, but then again, there once was a day when building a desktop PC was an absurd project."

What day was that? 1950? First Desktop PCs were sold as kits, you realise.

Battery Life is the big issue

[darrad]

Meches can find what he is looking for in just about any laptop produced today. So what if it comes loaded with more bells and whistles than a belly dancer...whipe it off and start over.

Battery life of a week, on a system used for coding...I think that is a little far fetched. I have to agree with him on this point though. My COMPAQ (ewwww) 1200 barely has enough battery life to spend a week out of town checking email. Course...it is a Windows system.

What is the average battery life most of you see?

1 week battery life and integrated fast ethernet?

[alen]

"Insanely long battery life. I don't mean 'barely survive the flight from NWK to LAX'. I mean 'I'm only going to be in Tokyo for a week, so I won't need the AC adapter.'"

"Good built-in networking. No PCMCIA stuff, dongles, or other junk. The system should have a respected 100base-T card built in, and probably an 802.11b card and high-gain antenna as well."

1 week battery life? I think you should invest in an international power adapter. And you don't want PCMCIA sockets, why not? What about expansion?

Re:Build your own laptop?

[spamacon]

I agree with your comment. Old laptops seem very well suited for a Linux machine, but...

>>And you don't want PCMCIA (PC-CARD), well bang goes most of your hardware customisation options right there!

I think you might have missed the point of the comment. He wants good built in networking, not some funny PCMCIA card with one of those flimsy cables that everyone looses. He doesn't mention ditching PCMCIA altogether (like legos with out the little bumps), just doesn't want to use it for networking.

spamacon

Hello, Sally, this is Harry

[babbage]

If it can do that, I don't care all that much about CPU speed, disk storage, CD-ROM or DVD drives, USB, FireWire, IrDA or integrated late makers. Oh, and it needs to run Linux, or at least OpenBSD or NetBSD. So, basically, I want a tough little system with a StrongARM CPU, a flash disk and grayscale 1024x768 LCD. Insofar as I can tell, no one makes such a thing.

Going to a restaraunt with you is a staggering exercise in pain & humiliation, isn't it? I can just tell: you must be the sort of person that looks over the menu at a fine dining establishment and then makes the staff do backflips to come up with some esoteric custom dish for you, because the many, many fine offerings they provide are never quite right. Give me a break... :)

I wouldn't pick at you, because you've clearly thought about this a lot, but somehow you haven't noticed that your requirements are, aside from just plain silly, mutually exclusive & thus impossible. You want a week long battery -- yeah right! -- and you want ultra light weight (thus, um, no battery??) and built in high speed wireless networking? How much power do you think that's going to draw? I'll admit, I'm not sure myself & maybe it's less than I'm thinking, but you are going to have to make some compromises between these wildly varying demands. If you want long life, it means a big battery. If you want lightweight, it means a small battery. You pick.

And in the, assuredly long time you're going to spend ruminating over that dilemma, there will be thousands of others that take one of the many fine off the shelf offerings, meet 90% of what you seem to really want here, and they'll be able to get on with their lives without a second thought. Might I suggest relaxing & trying to do the same?

Re:Hello, Sally, this is Harry

[squaretorus]

And in the, assuredly long time you're going to spend ruminating over that dilemma, there will be thousands of others that take one of the many fine off the shelf offerings, meet 90% of what you seem to really want here, and they'll be able to get on with their lives without a second thought. Might I suggest relaxing & trying to do the same?

Surely this isn't in the spirit of the analy retentive puritanical /.er!! Why settle for 90%?

We're not talking about functionality here - we're talking about fetish. We're talking about obsession, compulsion, and personality disorders!

Its like having a model railway - its a way of avoiding your woman by spending untold hours online and in the garage making tiny, but observable, changes to a train, hedge, track, motherboard, skin which REALLY matter to you, but are incomprehensibly pointless to the rest of the world. You dont have to watch endless soaps and listen to her bitching about work mates - AND you get a new toy sometime!

In many ways its like art. The pursuit of perfection is always worthwhile if it matters to you. Who cares if it doens't matter to anyone else. If he gets it right he could be using this machine for 20 years. Text is text. A bit of effort is well worthwhile.

Applause to this guy! The spirit of the shed in action.

Re:Hello, Sally, this is Harry

[rneches]

Interesting analysis of my personality, although your conclusion is rather far off the mark. I am a vegetarian, but other than that, I don't bug the wait staff at restaraunts. I've been a waiter, and I've also been a cook - I know what annoying customers are like. However, in my own kitchen, I can make whatever I like. [segue to actual point]

Your technical analysis is, although interesting, also off the mark. The fact is, there was a machine that met most of the requirements I outlined - the TRS80, and we all know how old that is. If you want a refrene point, what I propose is to build a modern system along the same lines as the TRS80. A 50 Mhz CPU is more than sufficent, and a non-backlit screen will do just fine. When the wireless card and LAN card aren't in use, you can power them down. Besides, you are right. It does draw less then you're thinking.

Since I wrote this article, I have found a number of hardware combinations that would essentially give me what I (and, if my crammed inbox is any testament, an astonishing number of other people) want: A portable system to hack on, not a desktop replacement. Basically, the questions are ones of design, not plausibility.

I have a Dell Latitude that I like very much. It runs Linux splendidly, it's pretty light, and I get fairly decent battery life if I stay in framebuffer mode (6-7 hours on one battery). But it's a lot more than I really want in a portable. What I propose is, from a technical standpoint, much easier than building a Latitude, or a Vaio.

I'm sorry if my tinkering offends you. If hobbiests annoy you, you don't have to listen to their ruminations or read thier posts on public forums. I happen to enjoy building things. The fact that a reasonable solution exists in off-the-shelf systems (with notable compramises) is quite beside the point.

When I'm at a resteraunt, I order what's on the menu. When I'm at home, in my own kitchen, on my own time, I'll cook whatever I want. I know Slashdot isn't as civil as it used to be, but for crying out loud, loose the attitude. Sure, I like to play with computers because I think it's fun. What are you accusing me of? Being a geek? A nerd? A dork? If you have a problem with that, what are you doing on Slashdot?

Re:1 week battery life and integrated fast etherne

[SuzanneA]

Most power blocks for laptops ARE international. All you need is the right cable from power outlet to the block, usually its a tele-funken (looks like a figure of 8). Some MAY use IEC connectors (the same as on desktop PCs), which again is a univeral connector.

When I took my laptop to the UK, I had no problem at all running it off 240V/50Hz, I just had to buy a 3 prong UK->tele-funken cable (not a problem, they're fairly univeral).

Japan shouldn't be a problem either, since the connector is used on a variety of game consoles and other devices.

Alternatively, you can buy connector adapters (without step-down/up transformers) that are designed to convert one mains voltage connector to another, for devices that auto-sense.

Ability to use AC power in a different country is obviously something that the laptop manufacturers thought about, so I wouldn't say extremely long battery life is a real need just for international travel:).

Re:Simpsons

[markmoss]

Or that urban myth about that Finnish guy that built a Unix-like kernel from scratch. There's a considerable difference between rolling your own software and rolling your own hardware. It's called "tooling costs." If you design your own mobo to fit your own case, it will cost over $5,000 to get _one_ bare board built. (This assumes you managed to borrow the software needed to do such a design -- it costs $5,000 to $50,000 -- and ignores the fact that it takes several years of designing boards to get good enough to have any chance of a design like this working on the first try.) Adding the parts to that bare board by hand will take you several days, and probably cost a few thousand, since small quantity prices are much higher than buying parts by the reel. And some parts are only sold in reels of 1,000 pieces or more. Machine-shop charges for a custom case, $500 to 1,000, assuming you didn't make it too complicated. Etc.

You could indeed use PC104 or another one of the standard bus families. You pay more for less performance, but you get good reliability since these cards are industrial grade. One issue is that your box will probably come out more cubical than lap-top shaped. Any of the rack-mounted systems are automatically at least 5 inches thick. PC104 cards are designed to stack one on top of the other, but if the clock speed is low it is possible to connect them side by side with ribbon cables. I'm not sure how low it has to be -- maybe 20MHz? But if you can live with that sort of performance, it would certainly help the battery life.