Rick's b.log - entry 2025/05/08

When you don't really need a Windows PC

The thing is, Windows isn't the only game in town.

Time for change.

First steps with Linux

While the Live install took a couple of minutes to start up, in use it... wasn't exactly snappy as this is hardly cutting edge hardware, but it felt faster than Windows. I think both UIs need to work on their UI responsiveness - a common problem that I have discovered since way back (XP, maybe 98SE or so) is that clicking something doesn't appear to do anything, depending on what you have asked for it might be "a while" so you click again, and the next thing you know two whatsits pop up. Clicking on something should have an immediate effect - even if that effect is to pop up an hourglass. In this way, you know that your demand has been noted by the OS and something will eventually happen.

Most things that I tried with Linux seemed to work, with the notable exception of sound. This worked one time in some apps but not others, but usually is just complete silence. It's annoying, but it seems the Intel chipsets use weirdo audio devices, and all of my computers (the XP box, the old EeePC, and this) fail to get useful audio from Linux. That being said, tiny little speakers are kind of horrid and with a bit of poking around (lots of sudo apt-get install and fiddling with conf files to bump the process priority to stop audio stuttering) I managed to get my bluetooth headphones working and can have proper bass response. As for the internal speakers, yes I've pulled that file from Github and thrown it to Bash. Everything was installed - it's worrying that support for the device appeared to need a replacement kernel - shouldn't this stuff be loadable modules? Whatever, there's still silence. At least now my Bluetooth headphones work, so there's that.

This morning I decided to install Linux onto a USB key. I wasn't quite feeling like erasing Windows entirely. So with the LiveCD key plugged in one side and the destination key plugged into the other, I set it to install a new system for me. It took about an hour (faster than Windows!) and kept me up to date with what it was actually doing at each step.

While the system itself was installed onto a 32GB USB key, for some reason the installer dumped GRUB into the main drive. This is good and bad. I was hoping that I could run the system like the LiveCD where it would boot into Windows unless I press ESC a bunch of times and selected to boot from the USB device. Instead GRUB always pops up and if I do nothing it'll start Linux by default. If the USB key isn't plugged in, GRUB will fail and dump me at a command line. Typing Exit twice will get me to Windows.
Therefore one must surmise, even this computer thinks Windows sucks. ☺

Did I get what I was looking for? Well, my 32GB of storage has 8.3GB free and that is after installing Linux Mint Cinnamon and the Arduino IDE and all the ESP32 stuff. I can't tell you how big that is as I don't know where it was installed. It seems that Linux has a bad habit of just dumping executables into a bin or sbin (which may be in usr or someplace else) which makes things harder to keep track of. This is why apt-get...

Anyway, after copying all of my Windows backdrops into an archive, then unpacking on Linux, then fixing the filenames because invalid encoding (thanks Windows), I had lots of images to pick from every six hours (I'm not sure if it counts six hours of use or six hours of reality), then getting rid of that whole 'dark' look, and some other tweaks, I arrive at this...

My PC's desktop.

If I had to level two criticisms at this, it would be these:

• Problems with "unusual" hardware. While I can accept that the Intel Cherrytrail chipset is as much of an oddity as the others, this is an old computer. Shouldn't there be a mechanism where 'fixes' can be detected by the hardware and applied at install time rather than the user screwing around at the command line trying to make sense of contradictory forum posts? Even Bluetooth audio (using SBC, so nothing too fancy) initially failed because the daemon hadn't been allocated enough of a timeslice to ensure reliable playback. I can thank those who took the time to sort it out before me, but again, out of the box would be better...
• What's with those stupidly thin scroll bars? I did try to override the theme defaults to make them bigger and it worked for some scroll bars, but not others. Window content ones, yes. But the up/down list scrollers, no.

As for the plus points? Well, it boots from cold in about a minute. Pretty much the same as Windows. In use it feels quite a bit snappier. When you tell it to do something, it generally does and doesn't first sit there and think about it, like Windows when you ask it to copy a bunch of files and it tells you it's calculating how long it would take which can take longer than just going ahead and doing it. As a test I just copied about 3GB of videos from my phone. It took some time as it was doing about 13MB/sec, but it copied straight away and didn't stall, and the remaining time was fairly accurate. Windows showed a pretty chart but it first had to calculate the time necessary (this took several minutes) and then it kept stalling. Oh, and the time remaining thought it would be about 40 minutes right up until the end. Windows is dumb.

I have not used this system much otherwise. At the moment Firefox is streaming WZBA Baltimore, and it only glitched a couple of times while transferring all of that data. Firefox itself seems pretty solid. As you might have been able to see from the desktop screenshot, the processor is running at about 36-40°C. When running Linux, I can put my hand on the upper left of the keyboard and it doesn't feel warm.
There isn't fancy control of my HP inkjet, but on the other hand using mDNS and IPP, it was automatically detected and registered with the system. I asked for a test page and, well, it just worked. I asked it to print the above screenshot and it failed. I set my printer as the default printer to use 🤦, then tried again. It printed the image rotated and scaled to nicely fit the page - something HP's own Android printer app can't manage!

Asides from the gripe about the tiny scroll gadgets, and some sort of oddity when windows touch the top of the screen and suddenly resize themselves to a sort of half-screen tile, I actually quite like the look and feel of this UI. Things are clear, things work as expected, and it's minimal without being obnoxious. Of course, it is also a Linux window manager, which means that I could probably reskin it as alien barnacles with all the menus in Klingon. But for what comes supplied, it didn't take much rummaging to ditch the dark theme and make it a brighter friendlier UI. The main thing for me, actually, was turning off the option where clicking a scroll gadget jumps to that location. I can see the point, but I'm far too used to "click a random place below the active scroll zone to go down a bit" which is how it works in RISC OS and all the Windows I have used.

But, of course, the proof is in can this do what I bought it for? Well...

Building firmware using the Arduino IDE.

Well? The first build of the standard CameraWebServer took about five minutes, and after changing something (to have the OV5640 horizontally flipped by default), a subsequent build took just over a minute as, clearly, all of the libraries and such had now been built and didn't need to be done again. For some reason, the Windows version seems to want to do a complete build each time.

It's not as fast as my phone, but it is way faster than under Windows on the same hardware. Plus, it's the latest version of the build environment. The one on my phone is something ancient like 1.03 or the like - sadly it looks as if it's destined to be an abandoned project.

So that's a YES then.

More on the Asus E200H

The display is a TF panel. Which means that what it looks like is highly dependent upon the viewing angle. This was common in lower-end hardware back then, though seeing a TF panel in something these days is nearly unforgivable - even my freebie tablets come with better displays. But I'll let it slide as, as I said, this is old hardware. My first frebie tablet had a display panel far worse than this one. It's also quite bright in a dark room, but not so great in broad daylight.

The chipset itself is interesting. It is a quad-core x64 processor clocking around 1.4GHz that draws about 2W and runs from a 7.6V battery. What does that sound like? I can't help but think that maybe this was some sort of side-effect of the ill fated Windows phone; because those specs are not unlike those of my freebie tablets, or a RaspberryPi. In other words, ARM territory, rather than the massive slabs with towering dual-fan heatsinks that people of a certain age might associate with Intel processors.
As such, this machine is completely silent. It is entirely passively cooled. At the moment, doing nothing, it's running at about 31°C. It went up to the low 40s when watching a video. I think that's the most arduous task I've had this machine do that wasn't "running Windows". ☺

Let's peek inside.

As can be seen, the battery takes most of the space. The motherboard is quite small. I have not stripped it down any further, if you want to see the other side then click here, but it's basically two more memory chips and a chunky large square that is the Intel chipset, and next to it an almost equally large chip that is a 32GB eMMC. It can be changed for a larger one, as the linked document demonstrates, but since we're looking at reflowing solder to pins underneath the chip, it's way beyond my skill set. Suffice to say, unlike the older EeePC, this storage is soldered to the motherboard. The only plug-in thing is the Atheros WiFi board, taking up part of a tiny PCI Express socket.

Using hdparm, I did some timings, buffered disc reads.
The onboard drive was the fastest, measuring 260MB in 1.85 seconds, or 140.16MB/sec.
Next is the USB key, plugged into a USB3 port, that manages 206MB in 3.03 seconds, or 68.06MB/sec.
Finally the SD card which only managed 18MB in 3.11 seconds for a read speed that is embarrassing - a mere 5.78MB/sec.
I'm using a USB key, by the way, as this machine is unable to boot from an SD card. The built-in eMMC drive or something plugged into a USB port. Those are the options offered by the BIOS.

Final verdict?

Your comments:

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Rob, 9th May 2025, 00:53

I'm still debating on switching to Linux on my laptop. Its currently running Windows 10. It'll run 11, but I've see 11, and I don't like it. Maybe if there will be ways to neuter all the MS tracking crap, and if Classic Shell (or whatever it's called this week) still works. I have a few apps I use that don't have a Linux version (unless I port it myself) so this is limiting me.    I run several server machines and multiple VMs, mostly running various flavours of Linux, so I'm pretty comfortable with running stuff in the command line. I don't have anything that runs a GUI though. The last time I actually tried to use a Linux Desktop it was pretty horrible. I really should test it again...

William Black and White, 9th May 2025, 02:11

In the end, you won't enjoy the system as you do RISC OS. All this time faffing around I bet you, with your skills, could have coded whatever you needed on RISC OS.

Colin, 9th May 2025, 10:55

'One must surmise' Nice - havn't heard that in a while. Bonus points for 'surfice to say'.(;-|)

Rick, 9th May 2025, 11:54

If it were possible to write code in Zap, toss it to the Espressif compiler to build and make a ROM image, then upload it to the microcontroller using RISC OS, I'd be doing that already... 😉

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