hello,

as alwas: imho. (!)

is it possible to install for example a current "vanilla" debian arm64 on this mainboard!?

what i mean by that:

write the "official" debian arm64 installation image to a thumbdrive, press some key & boot into the installation!?

and run the resulting system with the distributions "offical" kernel from the debian arm64-architecture!?

w/o jumping thru a few "hoops" like a lion in a circus ... ;)

i know ... the "openness" of the descendants of ibm pc at compatible machines was some kind of a "historical" error by ibm, but i got used to it!!

i like to "own" hardware i bought with my hard-earned money. i heavily prefer hardware, which is easily bootable from "inoffical" boot-medias - read: FOSS ... eg. linux/*BSD/...

and i'm not interested in "clamped down" hardware a la "most" available ARM boards - regardless of notebooks/tablets/phones ...

just my 0.02€

software-developer ~ devops-/cloud-engineer ~ linux system-engineer

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i'm a veteran technology professional (25+ years) with experience in a variety of software-development, system-architecture, systems-administration, service-reliability-engineering and devops-/cloud-engineering (container / kubernetes) roles.

i'm a highly motivated self-learner, an excellent problem solver and i can help you to resolve your technical obstacles.

hello,

as always: imho (!)

i own a x200s ... bought it in march of 2009 =?> so its approaching 17 years ...

it was a really great device with one of the best keyboards for a small notebook. and i still use it multiple times a week for example to browse hackernews, reddit, ... or watch some video etc.

buuuut: its nearly 17 years old ... everything is starting to wear - i wouldn't invest a dime into it right now.

what do i mean by that: keyboard has faulting keys, case starts breaking at heavily stressed regions - for example around the cursor-keys -, display is (slightly) mechanically damaged, batteries are beyond usefull etc.etc. ...

just my 0.02€

I also have an x200s that I got new in 2009. I've replaced the keyboard, battery (multiple times), palm rest, upper shell, and probably a few other things I'm forgetting about. I haven't put new parts on it for a few years, but as recent as ~2020 they were very easy to get and affordable. My little x200s is a dedicated HaikuOS machine now and I hope it keeps running for another two decades!

Props too you. We should only buy new when repairing isn't viable. Our throw it away and buy a new one mentality is destroying our planet.

A mobile core2duo system struggles under the weight of the modern web. If you live outside of that though, it's more than adequate for virtually anything. These days it's basically an SSH terminal with a fantastic keyboard that floats around my house and boots up quickly.

The X200 of Theseus. ;)

I don't know about the X200S, but I had several X200 non-S, with Coreboot, up until recently, and they were worth repairing, as evidenced by resale value.

(New keyboards are inexpensive (at least before tariffs), the replacement palmrest plastic part can be found and very easily replaced, you can still get batteries for them. And if you have a pressure mark on the LCD, apparently that's not a showstopper. Add a $20 SSD and max. the RAM, and it's better than new.)

My understanding with this project is they also replace the screen and battery with newer parts e.g. higher resolution, or at least that's an option, and all the ports are new (it's a new motherboard). So really the only 'old' parts are the keyboard and chassis. My understanding is there's lots of cheap replacements for the keyboard floating out there given the mass production and the original intention for this device to be easily serviceable by IT departments instead of "RMA everything."

What's a good alternative to 2010 Thinkpad X200 series, with potential for coreboot support?

Can't recommend starlabs enough, fully replaceable everything, coreboot, modern specs, Linux compat, firmware over lvfs

Thanks for the rec, didn't know they had moved on from Clevo designs to their own board design made by Quanta/Compal/Wistrom etc.

Didn't know they were rebadging in the past, they've been using their own hardware designs for at least 6 years.

I looked into that category (of small and lightweight laptops, for travel) earlier this year, without the coreboot requirement. I ended up with a Panasonic Let's Note SZ6-CF. Also cheap - imported from Japan via eBay - I think it is better than the X200 series in almost every way, newer, faster, lighter. It might also have a better display than the default of the thinkpads. Only drawback: soldered memory (a crime against the longevity of those machines).

If you're interested in something of an even higher degree of robustness and are fine with an ARM device, check out the MNT Reform Next: https://www.crowdsupply.com/mnt/mnt-reform-next

I really wish we could get an MNT device with upstream support, if not an x86 processor. Having used the Pocket Reform, I think about it quite often. It's almost perfect.... but the ARM chip and all the warts that come with SoC crap basically is the one single thing that keeps me from using one.

Open Arm devices sadly live in the shadow of closed Apple Mac Mini perf and battery life, and Asahi is stuck at 2022 M2 SoC. Some older Arm Chromebooks have mainline Linux support and also run coreboot. Qualcomm and MediaTek/Nvidia are "maybe next year" Linux and closed firmware.

"Open" is a misnomer, I really wish people would stop throwing it around with regards to ARM systems because it's a serious problem. Apple's devices are no better or worse about this. It's just the nature of the SoC ecosystem.

> Apple Mac Mini perf and battery life

Battery life? You mean the macbook, not the mini, right?

Speaking candidly, if both MNT devices and Apple's devices had perfect upstream support, I'd choose MNT every time regardless of battery life or performance. On a trivial level, I like the design language more, I prefer to buy boutique, etc.

For actual material considerations, MNT overbuilds their stuff to a ridiculous degree. That's what I want out of a laptop more than anything. There's a sense when holding the pocket reform that you could yeet it full send onto the pavement and you'll just scratch the shell. I like that. It might not necessarily be true, but there's a sense of solidity I get from an MNT device that I don't get from an Apple device. I'll take almost any drawback to have something that's overbuilt to hell, and I'll pay a pretty penny for it. The one thing that keeps me away is being locked into a specific distro. If the distribution was minimalist like KISS or Void, or if it was FreeBSD or OpenBSD, this qualm disappears. MNT unfortunately runs a Debian fork, that's a non-starter for me.

> If the distribution was minimalist like KISS or Void

Seems like you can install Arch on an MNT device. [1]

[1]: https://community.mnt.re/t/install-arch-linux-arm-on-mnt/742...

Yes, also had one and it was decent for its time, but it’s not great, especially compared to anything you can get today.

hello,

i've used it during my last job =?> its a really great project!! :+1: ;)

and its really useful not only for IBM hardware - a lot of smaller quantum-computing vendors have integrations for their hardware:

they are called qiskit-providers and are available in the community-project:

* https://github.com/qiskit-community/

sadly they are sometimes of lets call it "varying quality" depending on the vendor ;))

cheers a..z

> "ARM or x86? ISA Doesn’t Matter"

> * https://chipsandcheese.com/p/arm-or-x86-isa-doesnt-matter

Some people, for some strange reason, want to endlessly relitigate the old 1980'ies RISC vs CISC flamewars. Jim Kellers interview above is a good antidote for that. Yes, RISC vs CISC matters for something like a simple in-order core you might see in embedded systems. For a big OoO core, much less so.

That doesn't mean you'd end up with x86 if you'd design a clean sheet 'best practices' ISA today. Probably it would indeed look something like aarch64 or RISC-V. So certainly in that sense RISC won. But the win isn't so overwhelming that it overcomes the value of the x86 software ecosystem in the markets where x86 plays.

You would also get rid of all the 8/16-bit shenanigans still somewhat present.

Intel had a project doing that a few years ago, called X86S. It was killed after industry opposition.

hello,

as always: imho (!)

congratulations on shipping!!

fwiw: i have to admit, i may be getting "to old" to understand this online/service hype which took over "the it world" years ago ...

create an online-service and market it with "no upload", "local", "privacy" etc...

idk ... whats the advantage over "my" image-conversion-tool which i use heavily since decades ... if i remember it correctly, since around the late 1990ties (!) ... drummroll ... meet:

ImageMagick ~ Mastering Digital Image Alchemy

* https://imagemagick.org/

its utility called "convert" does everything a "normal" person could want for image-conversion.

its FOSS, runs locally in your terminal or GUI, produces stunning results and again: no internet needed, no privacy-concerns etc...

source-code available at

* https://github.com/ImageMagick/ImageMagick

it has lots of language-integrations etc.etc.

* https://imagemagick.org/script/develop.php

just my 0.02€

ps. if i want do develop such a converter which could run locally in the browser, i would take a look at the wasm-port of imagemagick, available here:

* https://github.com/KnicKnic/WASM-ImageMagick

I think a quick tool online is more convinient for common use cases, without install software. when-ever, where-ever a browser is ok.

however, for professional requirements and use cases, a professional software is a MUST choice.

different requirements, different service to met :)

hello,

thanks for the great article!!

2 remarks from my side:

* some smartctl -a ... output would have been nice ~ i don't care if it is from "when the drives where shipped" or from any later point in time

* prices are somewhat ... aehm ... lets call them "uncompetitive" at least for where i'm at (austria, central-europe, eu)

i compared prices normalized by cost pro TB with new (!) drives from the austrian price-portal "geizhals"

* https://geizhals.at

for example: for 3,5 inches HDDs sorted by "price / TB"

* https://geizhals.at/?cat=hde7s&xf=5704_3.5%22~5717_SATA%203G...

sometimes the prices are slightly higher for the used (!) drives ... sometimes also a bit lower, but imho (!) not enough to justify buying refurbished drives over new (!) ones ...

just my 0.02€

hello,

as always: imho. (!)

while i personally really love SQLite for a lot of use-cases, i wouldn't recommend / use it "in serious production" for a django-application which does more than a simple "hello world".

why!? concurrency ... especially if your application attracts user or you just want to scale your deployment horizontally etc. ;))

so in my opinion:

* why not use sqlite for development and functionality testing

* postgresql or mariadb/mysql for (serious) production-instances :)

just my 0.02€

Yeah, I've also found that foregoing Postgres is one step too far. It's just too useful, especially with Listen/Notify making it a good task queue broker. SQLite is great, but Postgres is definitely worth the extra dependency.

You distilled the point well. SQLite is great, but Postgres still hits the sweet spot.

hello,

as always: imho. (!)

hmmm ... i think spring-boot combined with either java or kotlin is a very good alternative to django.

even so i wouldn't compare them directly, but static typing avoids a lot of problems.

idk ... for me personally one of djangos great features is its custom db-model and relative (!) painless db schema-migration.

for spring-boot i often went with the tool flyway for handling db-migration ...

just my 0.02€

hello,

why not somehow try to "replicate that experience" you had?

eg. help / mentor young(er) people who have "nothing" / are early in their careers right now!?

this is what i at least tried to do ... :)

just my 0.02€