pi-top 2 with RO

Has there been any ‘road tests’ of the pi-top2 ie keyboard mouse keys etc?

Interesting read:-

https://3dprint.com/45158/pi-top-version-3/

The article you refer to is from 2015 and talks about the mouse button design on the old case. The Pi-Top 2 is a very different design. I have no idea whether the mouse buttons are dones in a similar way.

I now have a pi-top version 2. The keyboard is quite nice. The touchpad works but the buttons doesn’t seem to work under RISC-OS as they should. For now I have just connected a standard mouse.
For the rest the inventor stuff ( LED’s , buttons and board ) are a nice addition. I’m glad that I have bought it now I can go the club meetings without hauling screens etc.

I think one big problem I have with the Pi-Top 2 is it makes me wish I hadn’t bought a Pi-Top 1 :-(

Look it from the other side. You now have the experience that it is nice to have RO in laptop form much cheaper then in the past. And the Pi-Top 2 can always come later.

I think one big problem I have with the Pi-Top 2 is it makes me wish I hadn’t bought a Pi-Top 1 :-(

I second that…

You now have the experience that it is nice to have RO in laptop form much cheaper then in the past.

True, but set against that the unreliability of the battery (is the Pi-Top 2 better?), the keyboard misbehaviour (probably fixed by recent RISC OS updates) and some difficulties upgrading the OS (boot sequence, screen stuff, shutdown application etc.) I wouldn’t have described it as “nice”.

That said, it was a lot better value than a deposit for a RiscStation laptop.

I think this London show could be quite interesting for anyone interested in portable RISC OS. I can think of at least four options that will be on display (maybe more), some of which aren’t announced yet, but will likely be interesting to forum folks :)

anyone interested in portable RISC OS

It always seems odd to me that Acorn’s only ever portable was the A4. Shame there was never a portable RiscPC generation machine…

But now, a little HDMI display, a Pi, some batteries. Okay, it’s going to be a bit half-assed and clunky but it’s doable so more professional options are possible too.

Here’s a dinky little LCD on a Beagle. Like I said, half-assed, but a bigger box and proper mounting could hide away connection wires and maybe give space to work out some sort of small keyboard? It’s kind of fun thinking up ideas…

I saw a Stork (portable A7000) at Wakefield or maybe it was Olympia. I quite liked that.

Isn’t a possible way forward to port to a popular model of Chromebook? I guess the issue with any port is that you want a stable and documented platform, with some reasonable life expectancy (availability, at least). Rather hard to imagine when browsing random Chinese hardware sites!

Isn’t the Pi-Top a RasPi + case + screen + keyboard.

With ref to the Arm Chromebook – the Linux version of RISCOS – perhaps a good match?

Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a lightweight, slim, ARM-based laptop that was really nippy, could run RISC OS 5 natively, and could run firefox with a few clicks if you needed it. Wouldn’t it be cool if the manufacturers were aware of RISC OS and supported development? Maybe I’m daydreaming, or is it hallucinations brought on by excessive cold/flu medication?

Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a lightweight, slim, ARM-based laptop …

In 1996 Bruce Goatly lent me his Acorn A4 to take to Bangladesh. The power blackouts in Dhaka were no inconvenience to it. My host’s brother, who had just furnished a palace for the prime minister of Nepal with tiles from his own factory, was very impressed. He wanted one to show off designs to his clients. All it lacked was colour. I was more interested in its uses in the classroom.

We had an Acorn A4 at the Physiological Society’s publishing office. It used to go to Physiology conferences. I don’t remember – did it have a floppy drive? I think it must have done, or did we have an external one? The lass who produced The Proceeding of the Physiological Society accepted floppies from all the presenters of papers at the conferences*, loaded them into the A4 and had half done the copy-editing and make-up of the journal by the time the conference was finished. (She’d generally finished the job ready for printing a day after returning to the office – on her RISC PC.)

*Originated on all sorts of software on all sorts of computers.

The Acorn A4 ….. did it have a floppy drive?

Yes. How else could you shift files around? I seem to remember we had a frisbynet in those days.

Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a lightweight, slim, ARM-based laptop that was really nippy, could run RISC OS 5 natively, and could run firefox with a few clicks if you needed it. Wouldn’t it be cool if the manufacturers were aware of RISC OS and supported development?

I think the only item that really matches that requirement to decent degree is the various models of ARM based Chromebook.
However the main aim of a Chromebook is to ensure no one can hack the OS and leave it in a state where it isn’t running Googles favoured setup which puts you in the position of needing their services for the software on it.
Hacking a Chromebook to run RO natively sounds like an interesting project.

Makes you wonder what it might take to make a hardware manufacturer take notice of RISC OS, doesn’t it?

Edit: Andrew is down with 5th cold/flu in three months.
Colds/flu are not as much fun as RISC OS.
You heard it here first.
Or RISC OS laptops.

This is where I hoped you were going, Andrew!

From what I have read elsewhere, it is possible to ‘root’ a Chromebook and use it google-less. Booting into RISC OS or Linux would be dandy!

It’s easy enough to build your own :)

How else could you shift files around?

Hence the next half-sentence in my post, “I think it must have done,”