I love UMPC, the idea of being able to carry a complete system in a pocket or small bag has always appealed and I've had a raft of machines, from my old HP Jornada 720 through to a (sadly died) One Mix Yoga. One that I had never owned is a Sony Vaio P Series. When one came up on ebay with no HDD and a wonky network card I couldn't resist.
This is a P11z and is widely regarded as a bit of an overpriced dud in it's day! The 2GB ram and the 1.3MHz single core processor left a lot to be desired especially when running WinBlow$ Vista (aaargh) off a 4200rpm HDD. However, running a lighter distro and an SSD I wondered if it could be a useful note taker.
So a 1.8" Zif 40 pin SSD was ordered and fitted and the network card issues where solved by simply re-seating it and re connecting the antenna cables! After my explorations a while back getting Linux to run on Linx 1010b I was expecting a battle and also having read a lot of people struggling with drivers I was considering my options. Then a brainwave, I wondered how well the Raspberry Pi desktop would work, a quick test with a live USB was stunning, everything works!
Whilst it's still not the quickest machine in the world its actually super fun to have the RPI OS on a super portable machine, I installed the image with all the optional software and whilst primarily this machine tends to hang around with notes for a project open in Libreoffice Writer, its fun to play with Mu and Wolfram and other stuff included in the RPI Desktop.
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