The Loongson-2 MIPS Lemote Yeeloong Netbook
Linked by h3rman on Thu 21st May 2009 11:01 UTC
Hardware, Embedded Systems Few hardware vendors have not yet launched their own mini laptop (or, "netbook"). Most brands these days produce their own version of the same hardware, with Intel's i386-compatible Atom cpu's and Windows XP installed on a spinning hard drive or sometimes still a solid state disk. Some Linux models are still sold by some vendors, among whom Asus, which more or less started selling in this OLPC-inspired genre of laptops.
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RE[3]: I don't like it very much
by h3rman on Fri 22nd May 2009 12:53 UTC in reply to "RE[2]: I don't like it very much"
h3rman
Member since:
2006-08-09

"With all due respect, but whatever the limitations might be, it's far from "a piece of crap".
Unlike for instance your linked Alpha 400 laptop the Yeeloong has a decent screen and a good keyboard. It's much faster, has 8x the RAM and a 160 GB hard drive, ships with a fresh kernel, etc.
The feature it has is not the "inability" to run certain software. It's the software makers who decide not to support the given platform. The feature is, 100% open hardware, no blobs.


You are right, Yeoloong has a beter screen, better keyboard and more ram and disk space. I just said that the only two good reasons for buying an Yeoloong netbook are:

1. you develop software for mips platform
2. you are a geek and you want to play with a mips toy

I would buy such a netbook for reason number 2. But 400 euro seems too much for what you get. I think 120 euro for alpha netbook is enough for a toy.

If you search alibaba dot com, the largest search site for chinese merchandise, you can find an mips netbook for 720 cny ~ about 75 euro. And the cheapest loongson 2f with 800 Mhz cpu, 512 ram and 4 GB nand flash hdd is 170 usd ~ about 120 euro. "

Hey that's interesting. :-)
My wife is going to Korea next month, perhaps she could pick up something in Seoul (no guarantees they've got it there, but they do have huge pc-related malls).
There are a lot of comments saying that the price is a bit high, perhaps a justification is if you compare the mass production of say Acer or Asus to the Yeeloong, they simply don't have the numbers to get it done for that cheap.
I also suppose that some of the money made, if any, is being invested in the software development, i.e. the GNU/Linux and BSD ports to MIPS, but I'm not sure.

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