The future of Libre Computing: Crowd Funding Campaign Starts Now

the breakout board is there for people to experiment with this kind of concept, but please be under no illusion about the comprehensive nature of the task that you're taking on.

firstly: you are likely to need to do some reverse-engineering of the battery. this is potentially dangerous as a short-circuit could cause a lithium fire. also if you disregard the safety protocols built-in to the battery: again, lithium fire.

secondly: related to the above, you will need to create a battery charging circuit. this will take perhaps around 3-4 months if you are an experienced electronics engineer. you cannot just "drop in any old off-the-shelf circuit" because they're customised to the specific battery. you *might* get lucky with a search and find that someone else has done this, but if you get it wrong: again, lithium fire.

thirdly: the screen requires extremely specific voltages for the backlight and for its input signals. this is something that you are likely to require a custom circuit for. you will be extremely unlikely to obtain an off-the-shelf circuit for it. cost in time: around 2-3 months of electronics engineering expertise.

fourthly: the keyboard will require reverse-engineering. you will likely have to purchase another keyboard in order to dismantle it and trace its circuits. once you have done so, you will then need to create your own keyboard matrix controller circuit, followed by writing the firmware. cost in time: around 2-3 months of electronics engineering expertise *and* software engineering expertise.

fifthly: you will need to reverse-engineer the touchpad. this may be easy (if it's USB-based), if it's I2C it will be harder to do, and will require firmware to be written.

sixthly: you will need an audio circuit, suited to the impedance of the speakers. this may be easy to achieve using an off-the-shelf USB-based audio amplifier.

at the end of all of this you have something that cost a fortune in terms of effort, to make *ONE* device for *ONE* person... yourself!

are you getting the message yet? you're looking at around a *YEAR* of effort here! just to do what... take an *older* design of laptop and "save the environment"?? naah, that's totally naive: the cost alone to the environment of the *food* that you'll be eating over the next year will be far in excess of the value of the laptop.

basically, please don't do it. yes it's fun do consider doing, but in terms of usefulness for effort expended, you would be much better off helping to create an alternate-sized EOMA68 laptop housing.

plase: take the older laptop, find some way that you can continue to put it to good use. if you personally can't use it, give it to someone who can.

tonlee the answers to these questions are self-evident, so i'm not going to give a detailed reply, particularly as there's just far too many of them and you should be using common sense. cables are cables: you can't plug the wrong thing into the wrong thing. linux is linux regardless of whether it's ARM or x86. usb devices are usb devices: if the drivers are present, the drivers are present and the hardware works.

Replicant is designed for ARM systems. So if you used an ARM computer card (like the A20 card) in a phone case, you should be able to use Replicant on that.

Firstly, I'm no expert at this sort of stuff. Take this as a guide, but don't quote me.

In terms of making a computer card from the PocketCHIP, I don't think you're going to be able to reach EOMA68 compatibility. The devices use an Allwinner R8 processor (see http://docs.getchip.com/chip.html). The fact that it didn't make the list for the initial EOMA68 card, despite being from the company whose processor was eventually chosen, suggests there was an issue. I can't tell you for certain what it is (likely something to do with video resolution), but the datasheet is linked from the page mentioned above.

As for freedom, the bootloader/initialisation stuff is good. The processor is probably decent, although I'm not sure if the R8 can run fully free, but the wifi card is concerning. I can't find the specs (they're probably nestled somewhere in the GitHub tree), so it's probably proprietary stuff given the severe lack of free cards.

If you really want something free, I'd suggest working with the BeagleBone Black instead. That's known to run fine without proprietary software. You'd have to check that it has the core features to reach EOMA68 compatibility, although the processor is more promising (a Texas Instruments one- I believe the issue with those was related to customs, not specs).