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Comment by edvinbesic | Hacker News Reader

I kind of wish that this was simply transferring the userland (maybe state) from one device to another instead of carrying as much computing power you can cram into a credit card sized device.

I want my laptop to last 10h while being very portable, so I will gladly sacrifice performance there whereas when I am at my desktop I do not have the same limitation.

If I could simply unplug this from my desktop and plug into my laptop to resume my work that would be interesting to me, or work to home etc., but as is it feels more like a gimmick.

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You kind of can already, stick linux on an ssd and just carry it about. I say ssd because not only are they fast, they can be powered over USB.

I suppose the optimal version of this would be to have your userspace carried on a cell phone, so you could plug your phone into any desktop and use it. There's already kind of versions of this, one where the laptop is basically a dumb terminal, and another called drivedroid which allows you to treat your phone as a bootable disk.

> I kind of wish that this was simply transferring the > userland (maybe state) from one device to another > instead of carrying as much computing power you can > cram into a credit card sized device.

yehhh that's a software thing... look how that's worked out in a completely oversaturated market that's controlled by a few massive incumbents with profit-maximisation as their sole objective.

... not working out so well, is it?

> I want my laptop to last 10h

that's just about doable with this design, and you can always get one of those portable 10000mAh external battery packs - just make sure it can do 12V and has a 5.5mm DC pin positive jack.

> while being very portable,

... how does 1.1kg grab ya? :) or, how about 40 grams for the computer card?

> If I could simply unplug this from my desktop > and plug into my laptop to resume my work > that would be interesting to me,

you can simply unplug this from the desktop housing and plug it into the laptop housing - that was the whole idea man! :)

I think you missed the point of the comment you're replying to. If I understand correctly, the parent commenter doesn't want a low-power processor, the kind that's appropriate for a phone or tablet or laptop, in their non-battery-powered desktop.

That said, you're right that the likes of Microsoft, Apple, and Google haven't had any incentive to make it easy for someone to easily transfer their whole computing configuration from one machine to another.

allo mwcampbell, did i see you on reddit a few days ago? so much has happened so fast :)

i understood it differently, but there are definitely people who don't want today's low-power tablet-style processors in a desktop computer.

(aside: let's remember that tomorrow's desktop processors will be lower power and more powerful even than today's tablet-style processors!)

those people are the ones that i'm specifically not targetting, here. i'm targetting the "good enough" crowd. and the makers. and the libre people. and those who are fed up with being spied on through devices that they paid for. we don't like paying to be snooped on, that's just f*g cheek.

> allo mwcampbell, did i see you on reddit a few days ago? so much has happened so fast :)

No, but I'm the one that pointed out this HN thread on the arm-netbook list.

Edit: Oh, and I talked to you a little on the #arm-netbook IRC channel a few weeks ago. I use the same nick on IRC as here.

A fun thing is that it is possible with the Qubes architecture, since VMs can be saved to a file and resumed at will (although qubes-rpc may not support it properly). Xen also has some other useful features like live transfer.

Note: I have not actually tested any of this due to lack of time, but is seems quite possible, although some software modifications may be needed.

the Allwinner A20, amazingly has Virtualisation: it's a Cortex A7 (the baby brother of the A15). google "Xen allwinner A20" for instructions on how to set it up. i'm looking forward one day to trying out android where it belongs: as a highly restricted and compartmentalised "application" that can be run full-screen on the desktop of a trusted OS.

It had also occurred to me that virtualization might be the best way to get Android running on an ARM-based EOMA68 computer, especially in a desktop or laptop housing. The Shashlik project (http://www.shashlik.io/) might be useful as a starting point for getting there. My one concern is that, in my experience with virtualization on a Windows PC, audio in a VM always has noticeable latency. But maybe it'll be better with Linux as the host OS, especially if the Android guest OS can be modified to cooperate more closely with the virtualization layer. Some equivalent of VirtIO for audio.

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