Nice, I'll link that later as well - the gsettings trick would have been great the first time I installed (trying to rotate the screen via tab and arrow keys was painful!)
I like your point about the anchoring effect of the GPD price. I think that influenced me exactly as you say. It's a shame about the few rough edges; this is so nearly a very compelling gadget!
I don't use it as a daily driver any more (I did for a bit while traveling, for obvious reasons), but it's been very useful as bench computer. Doesn't take up as much room as a laptop on a desk, has both a USB 2.0 and a USB 3.0 port for serial consoles and data transfers, is proper x86 so I don't have issues with running proprietary flashers on it. I think it's running 18.04 right now because I needed to flash an old Jetson board.
Bench machine makes sense. I have a very locked down MacBook for work and I don't much like macOS - a little Linux machine for my personal stuff that takes up almost no space on office days seems very appealing. I'll see how that goes!
A few typos and omissions that I'll correct later:
I ended up running it with a 512G micro SD card (not an SSD as I mis-state once)
It has a micro-HDMI port and runs fine in dual screen mode.
One of the pics is with the heatsink (not just the fan per my typo) removed to show the motherboard.
Oh and the case is very thin, but aluminium and should hold up fairly well I hope.
Finally the keyboard layout is very different from the usual, but it fits in all the important keys and I felt like I could get used to it quite quickly with a bit more exposure.
I'd love it if this form factor caught on again (but I hope mousekeys get upgraded to real mouse events asap).
It's good to see the kind of info that's not likely to be available from a manufacturer.
Especially findings that really need experimentation to pin down :)
I would try a very high performance USB 3 stick instead of SD, and carefully (write 200000 sectors of of zeros to it first, then reboot and) partition it and format with data blocks aligned similarly to how a SSD is optimized by tools that actually do it properly.
Factory formatting on USBs are often very shoddy so it can make a big difference.
When it's good it boots and runs faster than a HDD and not much slower than an internal SSD.
SD cards have gotten more optimized for FAT filesystems than ever, and they should really be formatted using the app downloadable from the SD Association itself. There's a Linux version of the app but it still formats FAT or exFAT but not EXTx or even NTFS.
That could move it up a notch.
I'd want to try one with Windows and see if that will control the fan, a 64GB USB would be enough for that.
Thanks for the performance tips, but oddly (?) it's quite bearable as-is. While it does take about 20 seconds to get from just-logged-in to clean start Firefox, it's completely fine once it's running. I guess 12G is still a reasonable amount of memory and so I'm mainly reading from cache after that.
Terminal apps are completely fine. I haven't tried running IntelliJ but the screen size was always going to be a problem for that so I'm more likely to run things in the bare terminal or from vim or something (I just started playing with Helix and like what I see).
So at the moment I'm using ext4 on the SD Card and I'll likely stick with that. If it feels too slow my next attack would be to take a needle file to the dodgy m2 card slot and see if I can get it working again. Failing that, though, I'll try your suggestions.
My notes on a previous generation version of the machine: http://vitor.io/notes-7-inch-mini-laptop
I haven't tried a new OS version since 22.10, I'll have to see if audio and touchscreen support have finally resolved on this one, too.
Nice, I'll link that later as well - the gsettings trick would have been great the first time I installed (trying to rotate the screen via tab and arrow keys was painful!)
I saw Jeff Geerling had a neat RISC-V machine with exactly the same form factor too: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2024/sipeeds-new-handheld-...
I like your point about the anchoring effect of the GPD price. I think that influenced me exactly as you say. It's a shame about the few rough edges; this is so nearly a very compelling gadget!
Do you use yours much having had it a while?
I don't use it as a daily driver any more (I did for a bit while traveling, for obvious reasons), but it's been very useful as bench computer. Doesn't take up as much room as a laptop on a desk, has both a USB 2.0 and a USB 3.0 port for serial consoles and data transfers, is proper x86 so I don't have issues with running proprietary flashers on it. I think it's running 18.04 right now because I needed to flash an old Jetson board.
Bench machine makes sense. I have a very locked down MacBook for work and I don't much like macOS - a little Linux machine for my personal stuff that takes up almost no space on office days seems very appealing. I'll see how that goes!
A few typos and omissions that I'll correct later:
I ended up running it with a 512G micro SD card (not an SSD as I mis-state once)
It has a micro-HDMI port and runs fine in dual screen mode.
One of the pics is with the heatsink (not just the fan per my typo) removed to show the motherboard.
Oh and the case is very thin, but aluminium and should hold up fairly well I hope.
Finally the keyboard layout is very different from the usual, but it fits in all the important keys and I felt like I could get used to it quite quickly with a bit more exposure.
I'd love it if this form factor caught on again (but I hope mousekeys get upgraded to real mouse events asap).
Excelllent article.
It's good to see the kind of info that's not likely to be available from a manufacturer.
Especially findings that really need experimentation to pin down :)
I would try a very high performance USB 3 stick instead of SD, and carefully (write 200000 sectors of of zeros to it first, then reboot and) partition it and format with data blocks aligned similarly to how a SSD is optimized by tools that actually do it properly.
Factory formatting on USBs are often very shoddy so it can make a big difference.
When it's good it boots and runs faster than a HDD and not much slower than an internal SSD.
SD cards have gotten more optimized for FAT filesystems than ever, and they should really be formatted using the app downloadable from the SD Association itself. There's a Linux version of the app but it still formats FAT or exFAT but not EXTx or even NTFS.
That could move it up a notch.
I'd want to try one with Windows and see if that will control the fan, a 64GB USB would be enough for that.
Thanks for the performance tips, but oddly (?) it's quite bearable as-is. While it does take about 20 seconds to get from just-logged-in to clean start Firefox, it's completely fine once it's running. I guess 12G is still a reasonable amount of memory and so I'm mainly reading from cache after that.
Terminal apps are completely fine. I haven't tried running IntelliJ but the screen size was always going to be a problem for that so I'm more likely to run things in the bare terminal or from vim or something (I just started playing with Helix and like what I see).
So at the moment I'm using ext4 on the SD Card and I'll likely stick with that. If it feels too slow my next attack would be to take a needle file to the dodgy m2 card slot and see if I can get it working again. Failing that, though, I'll try your suggestions.
Typos/omissions fixed and a few more pics/notes added.