Open Lunchbox Forums

Various x86 and arm cpu modules will be made available based on interest.

The battery, screen, hard disk, ram, and cpu (if socketed) will be easily replaced.

Quote from: Mine on January 27, 2015, 06:12:29 PM
Modular was decided to be able to cover as many different options that people ask for. Some want high performance, long battery life, rugged keyboard and a 12" width. Others want the same with a 15" or 17"display, and others only want a multicore ARM SOC and a durable case with rugged keyboard.

Having the mainboard, batteries, display and keyboards as modules allows the end user to  mix and match the features they want now. This also allows them to upgrade or replace these features in the future.

We have to observe the limitation of the computer arhitectures which currently surround us.. I think making a too modular design wouldnt be good..
Simply said i think we should design something which will incorporate the best of today (either x86 or the arm)

What can be made easy to replace: battery, screen, hard disk, ram, cpu?

I fell in love with the way apple made it earlier...
You push a button, and leds shine and show how much battery u got left

Changable LiFePO4 batteries like the ones RC people use (hobbyking.com)
nice small screen (if possible IPS)
NO INTERNAL WIFI (requires you to use like small edimax adapter which sticks like 3milimeter out of usb port)
2x eathernet jacks
alot of usb jacks
swapable internals (ssd, ram)
thinklight would be nice
NO SPEAKERS
audio card ( mic in, line in, headphone out, line out)
if possible a better audio card (with decent dac, and headphone amp) => can help design those
open software and all that good stuff
black colour

Quote from: specing on February 16, 2015, 03:45:07 PM
As per discussion in IRC:

- RGB LED with dimming and colour adjustment (vi a EC/OS), possibly even two in stereo?
- ability to turn it on/off (and possibly adjust intensity/colour) when laptop is "off"
- colour/intensity adjustment based on time of day and/or ambient light sensor readings
- powerful enough that no-one will have to run it at 100% in normal and not totally crazy circumstances

anything else?

I would suggest some cree warm white leds.. cheap and bright

color would be warm white.. because rgb only brings pain to configure
Can have ambient light regulation, but also allow manual change

No speakers please.
For a small daily carrying laptop (work, university, caffe) i dont really need speakers.
Dont forget you cant expect much from small speakers...
And nowdays everyone has some inear headphones around
Also would be awkward if your laptop started playing music in the library :


If u plan to include a  motherboard beeper.
Im against a motherboard speaker aka BEEPER, and would either replace it with a led, or have a dip switch (case switch) to enable/disable the beeps.

I would love these
ton of usbs  
2x ethernet ports 
card reader would be handy
   line in
   mic in
   headphone
   line out
some sata-esata can also come in handy

If you are going the Compatibility route and including the PS2 mouse/kbd connectors i would like to see:
paralel port
serial port
firewire
vintage dialup connector

Quote from: Ryushin on February 01, 2015, 02:59:07 PM
I'd like to see a Thinkpad A31p keyboard.  Dedicated trackpoint with no trackpad.

I have a a31p and i dont see any particular reason why is it so good (perhaps because I didnt try other keyboards )
Also the only thing i dont like on the a31p are arrow keys which are trash (and the arrow part thingie)... Also i would like to remove all media keys it has, and just leave the straight ANSI layout (i have ISO, but i preffer ansi, if it even exists in ansi).. And the shroom, leave the shroom

Personally i dont care what keyboard it will have because this laptop isnt intented for a comfortable long typing sessions..

EDIT: keep the trackbad, because you want people to buy it And disabling trackbad is simple

https://github.com/openlunchbox/openlaptop

https://github.com/openlunchbox/openlaptop.git

All the non-final files are in the Ernie branch

git clone https://github.com/openlunchbox/openlaptop.git

> Probably cached entirely due to RAM size > CF card size.

No, RAM is 6 GB and CF cards are 8 GB and 16 GB (fully grown Gentoo systems).

Sadly RAM never really got cheaper. In old times I'd pay 200 "credits" for 8 MB of RAM for my 486 - and I would be happy and have enough. Today I would pay the same amount of credits to obtain much more memory - but I would also need much more memory. So situation is somehow still the same from that viewpoint.


Yes, HDMI is evil, no doubt about it. Sadly a plethora of devices use it, especially a lot of screens that comes with 16:9 ratio. As long as they also have DVI or DP or VGA, well. But then, HDCP is also possible via DVI or DP, or it is a similar thing with a different name but still the same DRM crap.


> Blobs

Wow. Actually. I checked this

http://www.coreboot.org/Binary_situation

and wanted to cry. I never imagined there would be such an amount of blobs in there.
I had not yet noticed that. I mean, during kernel config I know that I have to include Radeon's UVD stuff and there is an option for CPU microcode. And in my old VIA based laptop was a softmodem that needed a blob. And Wifi besides Ath9k needs blobs. But this amount even on things that are core parts of a computer?

Why is everything today a programmable microcontroller of some sorts? I mean, okay, it does not all have to be hardwired silicon (which is less flexible), but then if you need porprietary firmware that has licensing issues, is insecure, buggy or backdooring...

But this also gave me new insight: So I thought AMD would do things on their own, since AMD should be capable of doing all sorts of chips. As they seemed to do in the past (iirc. they even had a few NICs of their own). But the need for a Renesas blob tells me AMD is either using a whole Renesas USB 3 silicon or at least a licensed "IP" in their SOCs or mainboard chipsets.

The question is: Can AMD give out specs? Can Renesas be asked for specs or code? Is there a generic Renesas USB 3 model that is used "everywhere", vendor-independent? So once somebody reverse engineers it we had a driver for all sorts of USB 3 controllers?
Or will we end up having multiple involved parties and nobody is really feeling responsible? Reminds me of my ITE SuperIO/EC problems or of intel's poulsbo desaster with the ImgTec chips.


And thanks for the hint on MiniPCIe. Never expected that parallel USB functionality there.