Tag Archives: technology

How much laptop can you get for 160 Euros?

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You know the dilemma: you are going on holiday, want to take a laptop to potentially do a little bit of light work or even some browsing, but really worry about what happens when your expensive piece of aluminium from Cupertino is stolen (or, in my case, left on a train), potentially full of sensitive information (though to be fair to Apple, cracking a locked down MacBook is pretty tricky). The alternative is taking something with you that might be less disastrous to loose, so maybe an old machine or, in my case, the cheapest new laptop with a 14 inch screen one can find. Step in a large South East Asian provider of electronic goods and an unnamed seller of reasonably priced laptops. In this case a 14 inch laptop with an alleged Intel N3700, 16MB of RAM and 128MB of SSD for 160 Euro. At this price one has to expect a bit of subterfuge, and indeed the processor was a slightly slower (though newer) X5-E8000 and the RAM turned out to be 8MB, but hey, it arrived on time, had Windows 11 on it and worked. Windows 11 laboured a bit with a 9 year old processor, so Debian 12 came (as ever) to the rescue. LXQt runs smoothly, video/audio playback and streaming works well and all internal hardware instances are supported out of the box (so to speak). Work works (?), as its quick enough to let Firefox run the office applications in the browser (if Libre-Office is not your thing).

So yes, thanks to Linux it’s perfectly doable to use a light, cheap but underpowered laptop for the price of an Apple ac-adapter for work and (a little bit of) play. If it’s sensitive information you’re carrying around, the encrypted home folder will sort that.

Just don’t have ‘user’ / ‘password’ as your login credentials.

a silver laptop with a linux desktop

The Pinebook Pro in 2025

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I recently moved house, and as usual during the whole rigmarole, one encounters bits and bobs behind cupboards, under beds or sofas or even in long forgotten, overgrown garden sheds. In my case, a laptop (or call it a notebook) fell of a tall cupboard while I was moving it around, trying to dismantle the bloody thing (the cupboard, not the laptop). I had completely forgot about its existence, as it was a purchase I made either early on in the pandemic, or just before, and a few doses of COVID-19 in the meantime obviously must have eradicated those synaptic connections responsible for the memory of this particular gadget.

The gift from above (yes, I caught it just in time) was a 2020 Pinebook Pro, a then inexpensive piece of technology by the fine lads from PINE64, who thought they could revolutionise the market for inexpensive gadgets by basing them on open hardware and software. In this case the thing was based on the original Pinebook, but with a little more ram and a bigger screen (and a metal shell). It came with a built in version of Manjaro on its tiny eMMC and had a micro SD card reader on which you could run alternative OSs on. The processor was an 6 core ARM Cortex-53, one of the most inexpensive CPUs, used in oodles of systems on a chip all around the world. I remember liking its looks, its keyboard and the fact that its built in Linux distro just worked. I took it to work to show my fellow geeks what 200 Euros would get you these days and worked away happily on it.

So far so, so groovy.

When I rediscovered the machine, everything was still working, but the repositories provided by PINE64 for their special version of Manjaro were obsolete, so a new OS needed to be found. 1 hour later, a little bit of hardware trickery, an exposed motherboard and some software tricks, and Armbian, the Debian distro for ARM SoCs was running with the latest kernel.

Everything that’s built in works out of the box: bluetooth, wifi, the sd card reader. It will never win speed competitions, and Firefox lumbers a bit, but Libre-Office and GIMP are running zippily, so what else do you need?

Thanks to those amazing technologists that keep Debian and the Linux kernel running, another machine has been saved from the local electronics recycling heap.