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Litebook Launches A $249 Linux Laptop (zdnet.com)
An anonymous reader writes:
It's "like a Chromebook for Linux users on a budget," reports ZDNet. The new 2.9-pound Litebook uses Intel's Celeron N3150 processor and ships with a 14.1-inch display and a 512-gigabyte hard drive with full HD resolution (1,920 x 1,080). For $20 more they'll throw in a 32-gigabyte SSD to speed up your boot time. "Unlike Windows laptops, Litebooks are highly optimized, come without performance hogging bloatware, [are] designed to ensure your privacy, and are entirely free of malware and viruses," writes the company's web site. They also add that their new devices "are affordable, customizable, and are backwards compatible with Windows software."
Don't you mean 500GB? AFAIK there's no 512GB mechanical HDD.
#DeleteFacebook
I bought a Toshiba laptop, wiped the Hard Drive of Windows 8. Upon powering it on without giving it a chance to boot, and installed Linux to it. Cost me about $320 Total.
>Richard Simmons has reportedly not been seen for over 1000 days, people! Possibly being held captive by his staff!
>We MUST get to the bottom of this, my fellow slashdotters!
Bennet Haselton has reportedly not been seen for over 1000 days, people! Possibly being held captive by anonymous cowards!
We MUST get to the bottom of this, my fellow slashdotters!
They buried the lead. The article mentions a much more exiting low-end ARM64 laptop called the Pinebook. Does that actually exist yet, or is it still vaporware? Anyone seen/touched one in the wild?
A current-gen Core i3-7100U costs ($281.00) more than this laptop.
But Braswell is kinda old by now, superceded by Apollo Lake.
Wow, this is revolutionary! A Full HD hard drive is a great achievement! Can you post a picture? Please?....
the SSD "upgrade" is in place of the HDD. No other HDD options, so you have to buy ANOTHER HDD if you want 1TB or 2TB and install it yourself I assume its a 9mm bay+sled that wont accommodate an older 12mm 2.5 larger capacity drive. Does any body make a 2.5 9mm drive with combined/integrated 16/32/64 GB SSD?.
There is no right to feel safe thru security vaudeville at the expense of everyone's freedom, privacy and tax money.
Last I heard of Pinebook on Slashdot was a comment by vux984 mentioning it in passing.
But one disadvantage of switching from x86 and x86-64 to ARM and AArch64 is inability to run the occasional Windows application in Wine. My work flow includes a few Windows applications distributed as free software, such as FCEUX debugging version, FamiTracker, and Modplug Tracker. All are usable in Wine, even on a dinky little Atom CPU. If you go ARM, you're on your own recompiling them for linking with Winelib.
The breakthrough is that you can run applications other than a web browser. To do so on a Chromebook requires putting it into developer mode. And once you've done that, anybody who turns it on can wipe the drive by pressing Space then Enter within 30 seconds of turning it on, causing you to lose all work that hasn't been backed up yet as well as the use of the device until you can reload your developer mode distribution. You can skip the 30-second interstitial by pressing Ctrl+D, but someone else who turns it on doesn't know that.
Isn't that the Skype icon I see in the dock?
AC comments get piped to
Their website
2017 and still solving the same fucking problems for the last 10 years
This is not true at all. Now with systemd there's a whole new set of problems.
lucm, indeed.
I have always used a ThinkPad that is off lease and verified. Newegg has a host of models listed between $200-$300. And the ThinkWiki will help you with the particulars if you aren't familiar with the model you get.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
Hello I'm one of the creators of the Litebook, and I'm here to address a few of the comments. The Hard Drive formats to 500GB, but is advertised by the supplier as a 512GB Device.
The SSD is not a replacement for the standard drive or a hybrid mechanical Hard Drive. Its a separate 32GB drive and is seen as such by the operating system.
Skype is not a preinstalled application. We include pictures of it to show Windows Users that the applications they are familiar with will run on the Litebook.
Thank You,
The Litebook Team
So much of the Linux laptop market seems to be targeted at the low end (current story), or the high end (Dell XPS Ubuntu developer edition). Only System 76 seems to offer anything middle of the road (core i3 for $700). Not really confident linux can get a foothold in a market with a Windows 10 laptop at every price point from top to bottom.
Where is the breakthrough here?
You can glue an Apple logo on it and nobody at Starbucks will be able to tell that it's not a Macbook, as long as you pick blurry fonts and remember not to maximize windows.
lucm, indeed.
Nuke it from orbit. Its the only way to be sure.
There is no right to feel safe thru security vaudeville at the expense of everyone's freedom, privacy and tax money.
If I wanted a Chromebook to run Linux on, I'd just buy a Chromebook and flash the firmware. There's an Xubuntu-derived distro specifically for the purpose, too, GalliumOS.
Wait, did I say I would do that? Let me correct myself. I already have. It runs Windows 10 the majority of the time, but it does have Gallium installed and bootable via rEFInd.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
Those aren't real prices. Like AC above says, you can buy systems from Intel with similarly prices processors for almost the same price as what Intel lists for the processor. Those are either place-holder prices (just so that they can list a price in their literature), or the price that you would pay as a consumer to get one processor if you could buy one (which you can't).
What's so special about this laptop?
If I go to Alibaba and search for "inexpensive linux laptop", I get 19k hits with products like:
- https://www.alibaba.com/produc...
- https://www.alibaba.com/produc...
- https://www.alibaba.com/produc...
The big thing seems to be an angle rather than technology (hardware or software).
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
Google Chrome calls home. There are many alternatives easily available without Google's stalkware baked in.
Skype is insecure spyware owned and operated by Microsoft with well known intercept capabilities. It runs and consumes bandwidth continuously whether your using skype or not.
Spotify is spyware that automatically collects data about you and your friends just by logging on.
Why is it that everyone selling to consumers offering privacy and no-bloat demonstrates the exact opposite? We won't preload heaps of shit except for the heaps of shit we preload.
It's like all these companies selling "eco friendly" products that are anything but.
There needs to be third party qualification program for security and privacy that actually meet specific articulable requirements. This wild west of everyone claiming they give a shit when in fact their actions demonstrate otherwise is worthless.
and that sour milk smell of body odor they carry with them everywhere.
You have an active imagination but they usually smell like shit due to an inability to reach their asses and wipe effectively.
Those are not actual prices, at least not the prices you get if you purchase. the mobile models are not purchasable by consumers directly so Intel don't bother with real prices on their website.
http://www.bestbuy.com/site/se...
seriously, 250$ does seem a tad expensive and non-newsworthy. you would probably be better off with a refurb elitebook with core i5.
cheapest nucs are under 250, but celeron as well and really not that good value for money if you consider you can get a screen, battery and and keyboard for the same price too.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
No, this is Linux were you do not need an ungodly amount of CPU power to do the simplest things...
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Maybe you failed to install that one? You know, if you do not install drivers in Windows, you get much the same problem...
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Fortunately, it is still quite optional unless you want Gnome.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Intel's Celeron N3150 processor ...
are entirely free of malware
I wouldn't be too sure about that claim if they're using a processor with Intel ME on it.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
It's an ad in disguise, it's not news at all.
Achille Talon
Hop!
No, it's actually more that Microsoft wields weapons-grade incompetence deftly enough to make everything use so many more CPU cycles that it just makes Linux seem like magic.
More like Microsoft uses extra CPU cycles to do the same thing. Seriously I've got the fastest computer I've ever owned at work, and the frigging Outlook on is slow, takes a couple seconds to delete an email. It seems that the faster computers get the slower the applications get.
Clearly you don't realize it, but you just basically re-stated his point without getting the point. Hilarious.
What Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh away.
Fortunately, in the mobile space, this is easy to determine. Look at the model number: if it starts with a letter, it's based on Atom. Just don't buy it. However, if it starts with a a number (may, but not must have a trailing letter), you are looking at Core based Celerons. Those are actually, very good. They make decent desktops for light users. Sure, you're not going to do some heavy CAD/CAM on them or high-end gaming, but for someone doing Office work they are fine. I have a user running a database on it (for specialized software related to his farm), and I have a Celeron running as a Xen host with a few light-use VMs on them. Works fine.
For desktop Celerons, I am not completely sure how to identify the lame Atom ones. From what I remember, if the model number starts with a "J", avoid them.
Now, of course, the described laptop is an Atom based one... So, I wouldn't buy it.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
When your Xorg process uses a ton of CPU and your graphics driver is bad, a linux desktop is quite bad with overhead also Gnome 3, KDE are pigs or at least quite heavier than XP was.
Linux is not magic, it is just (mostly) solid engineering. You are spot-on about Microsoft though. I mean it has gotten so bad that they are not implementing a "gaming mode" in Win10 to reduces all the inefficiencies. Who has ever heard of such a thing in a decent OS?
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Then please explain to me why Thunderbird connecting to a Linux server (over WAN, no less) does not seem to have that issue?
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
A couple company execs choosing the new aspect ratio on a whim in the 1980s or 1990s ruined it forever. It came down to one man agreeing to making something about half way between cinemascope and 4:3, but would he have pushed for 5:3, about 1.66.. and had the other guy agreed, the entire world would have been a bit different.
16:9 is arguably a bit too wide for TV as well.
Heck, I did see some dual LCD panel for VR on alibaba, one for each eye, with an aspect ratio of 1.2. This should give an idea about what the useful field of vision for one human eye is. 1.37 was an important historical ratio (even used on post-war French TV before switching to a PAL compatible standard)
Now we've got a generation reaching age 21 right now with no attention span, perhaps because 16:9 TV is too wide and literally doesn't allow them to focus on the people in the little box.
proper DRM is being worked on.
Why did the developers of the Direct Rendering Manager have to give it such a confusing name?
it is a tiny fraction of the overall system usage unless you have a severely underspecced machine.
Uh... isn't that the point here? How many CPU cycles you need to have to burn before your system isn't "severely underspecced"?
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Across an MPLS network to a remote facility, Four hops away of equipment that I touch, unknown number of devices for the MPLS provider, the end-device is 100BaseTX:
~$ ping 10.8.4.101
PING 10.8.4.101 (10.8.4.101) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 10.8.4.101: icmp_seq=1 ttl=60 time=1.04 ms
64 bytes from 10.8.4.101: icmp_seq=2 ttl=60 time=1.00 ms
64 bytes from 10.8.4.101: icmp_seq=3 ttl=60 time=0.970 ms
64 bytes from 10.8.4.101: icmp_seq=4 ttl=60 time=1.01 ms
64 bytes from 10.8.4.101: icmp_seq=5 ttl=60 time=1.02 ms
64 bytes from 10.8.4.101: icmp_seq=6 ttl=60 time=1.05 ms
^C
--- 10.8.4.101 ping statistics ---
6 packets transmitted, 6 received, 0% packet loss, time 5006ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 0.970/1.019/1.058/0.046 ms
Across another MPLS network, this time a colocated facility six hops away, including a crappy as hell mode-conditioning link because 2500' of multimode direct-bury fiber is expensive to replace:
~$ ping 10.8.21.102
PING 10.8.21.102 (10.8.21.102) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 10.8.21.102: icmp_seq=1 ttl=60 time=1.26 ms
64 bytes from 10.8.21.102: icmp_seq=2 ttl=60 time=1.22 ms
64 bytes from 10.8.21.102: icmp_seq=3 ttl=60 time=1.22 ms
64 bytes from 10.8.21.102: icmp_seq=4 ttl=60 time=1.16 ms
64 bytes from 10.8.21.102: icmp_seq=5 ttl=60 time=1.21 ms
64 bytes from 10.8.21.102: icmp_seq=6 ttl=60 time=1.28 ms
^C
--- 10.8.21.102 ping statistics ---
6 packets transmitted, 6 received, 0% packet loss, time 5006ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 1.163/1.230/1.286/0.044 ms
Tell us again how LAN latency would even be a factor.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Atom drivers for graphics finally working correctly? Color me true! And in 3D, preferably.
Ezekiel 23:20
What is the battery life for this notebook?
The original chromebook was cheap, light, booted fast, automatically synced files, and required practically no maintenance.
I bought one for $150. Still use it all the time. It is great for what it is.
Once you put a more powerful intel processor in it, and put a more capable OS in it, you lose everything special about it. No more fast boot, long battery life, cheap price, etc.
I just want to add that I agree wholeheartedly with you. I run a Celeron N3150 as a PFSense firewall... seriously overkill for that job, but it runs fanless and just plugs happily away day after day without a hitch. It does get somewhat toasty at times when there's a lot going on (I run Snort and various other services on the box so it can get up there sometimes) but even at high temps it seems to be really stable and usable.
I did put Linux on it at first and had the Ubuntu desktop running on it... very slick and fast with 8GB of RAM. Definitely no slouch of a machine.
No the OP, but I'll spell it out for you:
I can install Linux AND update it in less than a half hour. This includes installing all my desktop apps.
I have NEVER had Linux run 100% disk usage for 35 minutes after booting by something called "CompatTelRunner.exe"
The last brand new Windows 10 laptop I set up (three weeks ago) out of the box after creating the new account ran for hours and hours sucking all bandwidth available in a low bandwidth home for Windows Updates. I could not pause or stop this insanity so I could download and install Chrome and an Antivirus of choice. I had to leave it with instructions of "call me when it finishes the updates and I'll come back and finish setting it up for you."
I have worked on many Windows 7 machines which prior to Summer 2016 would run 100% CPU on one core for hours (sometimes days if far enough behind) to get the current updates.
My Linux installs do not take 5 minutes to boot because they lack things like Adobe Updater Startup Utility, Acro Tray, Java Platform Updater, Send to OneNote, and all the various speedlauncher autostarts to mask the true amount of time it takes a program to really startup when clicked.
I have been given systems to fix one small problem only to wonder how in Hell the owner ever used such a slug of a machine. I would have junked something that ran like that. It's not the Windows Kernel. It's all the shit that comes along with it. Those equivalent applications may run with similar performance on a clean system, but very few Windows machines are lean and clean. And God help you if Windows decides it needs updates then-and-there and whatever you want be damned.
Of course, for firewall any modern Celeron will do. I guess that the Atom based ones even have an edge because they have more cores. Depending on what deamons you run, that might turn out better than Core based ones that are pretty much all Dual Core without Hyperthreading.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
No, you didn't read it right. It says "no 802.11ac Wi-Fi", but it does have no 802.11n Wi-Fi.
A pity these don't come with 120GB SSDs from the start.
That was the single most significant upgrade I made to old laptops (including ones with old ATA/100 interfaces).
Starting with a 500GB slow-as-crap laptop-grade HDD sounds like a recipe for frustration.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
If you are someone who needs RHEL, why do you care what init system it uses? Has it hurt you in some way?
A properly set up Windows machine will not take minutes to boot, especially if you have an SSD to boot from. (Unless you have a system that simply doesn't have enough RAM. In that case, buy more if you can.) One key is to disable most of those automatic updaters and the programs that want to go resident at boot time. I keep the updaters for Java and Flash and turn off the rest; the latter will be able to go soon and the former is only important because I run development tools like Eclipse that use it.
Windows Update, on the other hand, is a genuine nightmare. If you plug in a brand new computer that has been on the shelf for a few months before you buy it, you're likely to be facing a process that will take hours and require multiple reboots. First, you might need to receive an update to Windows Update itself. Next you have to receive enough updates to be eligible to receive the latest build (Windows 10 terminology, sort of analogous to the old Service Packs), probably followed by a reboot. Then you receive the build; installing that takes THREE reboots though it's all automatic. Then you will probably receive some updates after the installation of the new build, possibly followed by another reboot. And any bundle of patches may include one that requires a DOUBLE reboot because it installs something at kernel level; the system has to reboot, perform an update in Safe Mode, and then reboot again.
If you have an older computer with a version of Windows before Windows 10 and have to reinstall from the installation media it's even worse. That one may involve some initial patches, a service pack, and multiple gigabytes of additional updates because the last service pack for your version of Windows came out a long time ago. (Before Windows 7 it could have even involved installation of MULTIPLE service packs, but Windows 7 made them cumulative.) And all the downloading of updates is unreasonably slow even on a fast connection. I have seen the entire process take 8 hours or more.
And after all of that is done, there is still the little matter of getting updates for your applications. Microsoft's own applications get handled by Windows Update, but everybody else's have their own separate processes that are all over the map. Some have boot-time updaters, some check for updates when you launch them or in the background, and some do nothing at all and count on you to visit the software company's web site from time to time. Device drivers might get updated by Windows Update, by an updater from your computer manufacturer, or by an updater from the maker of the device.
Over on Linux everything is much simpler and faster. ALL the updates are handled by a single program: OS, bundled applications, and third party applications. Downloading them is faster than on Windows, and you only need one reboot.
There are rare Linux updates that involve more than one cycle; they involve updating a very old computer. If you have something from a long way back that is running Ubuntu 10.04 and you want to move to 16.04, you would have to update to 12.04 and then 14.04 before you could go to 16.04. At that point it's probably easier to do a clean install of the new version. And if you ever have to do a clean reinstall of Linux (failure of the boot drive, perhaps) there is no reason to start with the version that was first installed on the computer; just start with the new one.