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PiTop testing

Authors: Nova[有線魔女] <novaburst@envs.net>

Date: 2021-10-05

As a matter of testing, I got a Raspberry Pi laptop from school, at least temporarily (though I don't know for *how* much).

Some teacher authorized me to carry one of them with myself so I can tinker with it.

At first glance said device's layout was literally weird to me, even more than my own laptop for that matter.

For example, the touchpad is not located below the keyboard, rather, it is side-by-side with the keyboard.

As for the keyboard itself, probably besides some weirdness arised with how the keys were placed and all that, there's also some extra dedicated keys, each for an specific action (opening file manager, a terminal emulator, etc), but there was missing an AltGr key for a chance, so no way of typing the '@' char or the '~' char on it. Haven't found a way with that.

Software-wise I was already used to Debian (this one is Raspberry Pi OS, formerly Raspbian) and was pretty much the same thing, besides CPU architecture (armv7l hard-float).

I haven't been really liking Debian though, it has many issues in and of itself, and that applies to derivatives too.

I still don't know how to, spin up Alpine on one of these devices. If dealing with uSD cards was already hard on a phone I don't imagine how is that on an SBC-powered laptop, huh.

I got bored of it for today, haven't done much other than finishing some pending things from yesterday.

I also customized the setup quite a bit, a hostname change, then the password change, and installed vim, lol.

One of my dreams was having one of those for myself, and probably tinker with it even more.

In my country they're expensive as hell, importation aside, and because blah blah blah.

See ya!

Update #1: I've taken ownership of the PiTop device, and I've installed Alpine Linux today on it. The device is codenamed MountainPie.

Update #2: Its microSD card died for unknown reasons. The device rendered useless as a result