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Hey 👋 I’m Lemann: mark II

I like tech, bicycles, and nature.

Otherwise known as; @[email protected] and @[email protected]

Dancing Parrot wearing sunglasses

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Joined 6 months ago
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Cake day: December 22nd, 2023

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  • This looks like one of those low cost netbooks from the time where “EPad” and “MID” tablets were a thing. There is an edition of Windows CE floating around for these - but WiFi will not work, neither the modem if this has one built in.

    No idea about Linux - there is a kernel so you’re technically half way there, but considering most of these had a slow single core ARM CPU and 256MB of RAM on a good day, practical use is limited IMO


  • ASMedia is the only controller IC manufacturer that can be trusted for these IME. They also have the best Linux support compared to the other options and support pass-through commands. These are commonly found in USB DAS enclosures, and a very small fraction of single disk SATA enclosures

    Innostor controllers max out at SATA 2 and lock up when you issue pass-through commands (e.g. to read SMART data). These also return an incorrect serial number. These are commonly found in ultra cheap desktop hard drive docks, and 40pin IDE/44pin IDE/SATA to USB converters

    JMicron controllers (not affiliated with the reputable Micron) should be avoided unless you know what you are doing… UASP is flaky, and there are hacky kernel boot time parameters required to get these working on Raspberry Pi boards. Unfortunately these are the most popular ones on the market due to very low cost










  • Not the case with ARM processors sadly, IMO they’re a bit of a mess from that perspective. Proprietary blobs for hardware, unusual kernel hacks for some devices, and no device tree support so you can’t just boot any image on any device. I think Windows for ARM encouraged some standardization in that regard, but for the most part looking at Android devices it’s still very much the wild west.

    This is one of the many reasons why Raspberry Pi ARM boards remain popular for the time being, despite there being so many other cheap alternatives available: they actually keep supporting their old boards & ensure hardware on their boards works from the get-go.

    There are also some rare cases where Raspberry Pi rewrite open source implementations of Broadcom’s proprietary blob drivers, in one instance for the built in CSI (optional camera)