The open source DIY laptop for hacking, customization, and privacy
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This unfortunately happened with the Novena. It was entirely open source, but there were a lot of out of tree patches that had to be applied to get a kernel fully functional. This meant that it was effectively frozen at 4.4 without someone to dedicate a lot of time to port the changes to a newer kernel (I say that as someone who tried, and gave up, to try to port the changes to 4.9).
Are you able to offer any insight about how I, a developer with only a little embedded experience, could learn enough about the process to meaningfully contribute to keeping the Novena up-to-date? Is there still a community around the Novena?
I tried to document what I did as much as possible for others to look at it. I recall I was able to update it to Stretch (with linux 4.4, not linux 4.9) and I was able to make the whole boot process/update process more debian friendly.
u-boot-novena is where I put all of the scripts needed in order to get the whole process to work with Debian Mainline.
The forums:
Also have most of the good bits of nuggets to figure it out too (that's how I figured out most of what I did). I don't know how much of a community around it there is anymore though (I really haven't looked in years).
EDIT: It looks like jookia actually did a lot of work and upgraded the Novena to Buster:
https://www.kosagi.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=542
I may try it sometime.
I have a Novena around collecting dust too and used it a lot while it was still getting patches. I'm actually more excited about the reform2, and already held a prototype unit at 36C3. It's very much what got me excited about open hardware laptops in the first place, but packaged in a more user-centric way. the Novena was always a pita to use on the go.
I imagine it uses u-boot already, that doesn't seem as hard to port to a system and upstream (I got vanilla u-boot working on a Novena, but it did not have some of the patches that bunnie and xobs put to it).
but... that enclosure looks kind of thick and blocky for a heavy travel setup. it also weighs about .5 kg more than a librem v4; that's non-trivial. it's nice that it's passively cooled, but i'm just having trouble seeing myself working with that laptop as i would others, for some reason.
In particular, I have a hard time believing the CPU (4x1.5GHZ A53) and memory (4GB RAM, non-upgradeable) will be sufficient for a lot of the more interesting uses.
The new pinebook pro looks like a better product, but I don't own one so I can't really comment.
I also agree that MNT looks philosophically interesting, but it also looks highly opinionated to the point that it is a challenging sell even for the niche audiences of people who want an open source laptop and/or an ARM laptop.
(and there's also a bounty apparently! https://www.bountysource.com/issues/88375235-reverse-enginee...)
I'm surprised you don't like the keyboard though, I found it to be shockingly good. I often write on it instead of some of my other keyboards. I'll add the disclaimer though: I like apple scissor switch keyboards, and dislike mechanical keyboards. So that colors my opinion.
This is very much a laptop that has not allowed perfect to be the enemy of good, and I'm glad it exists. And I'm glad I got one!
That way you get as good (or bad) of setup as you can afford rather adding the price to every laptop