Ready to drool over new Linux hardware? Star Labs are ready for you to open your wallets to the 14" StarBook Mk V. Now this is the type of laptop model I can get into. A screen that's not too big, a sleek chasis and a reasonable price backed up by some powerful internals along with it being designed for Linux.

With the new StarBook Mk V, you get quite a lot more choice too. When it comes to the BIOS, they're now letting you choose between AMI (American Megatrends Inc.) Aptio V and the open source Coreboot. Not only that, you can switch between them any time you want.

A nice matte screen as standard too with the 14-inch ARC display, with anti-reflective coating that should provide a good experience whever you are. Star Labs say it comes with a hard coating to prevent damage too.

Some of the specifications on offer:

When it comes to operating systems you get a lot choice there too between: Ubuntu 20.04.2 LTS (64-bit) or later, elementary OS 5.1.7 (64-bit) or later, Linux Mint 20.1 (64-bit) or later, Manjaro 21.0 (64-bit) or later, MX Linux AHS 19.3 (64-bit) or later, Zorin OS 15.2 (64-bit) or later and even Windows.

Available from £777.00. Check out the official page to find out more and order.

It's currently in production, which may be delayed due to component shortages worldwide right now. They offer a 5% discount if you order a laptop that's in production and not yet ready.

Linux hardware vendor and Pop!_OS Linux distribution maker System76 are getting closer to releasing their custom Keyboard, and they've begun teasing out a lot more info on it.

Firstly it looks like the entire code for it is now live on GitHub which goes over quite a lot of detail about it. The System76 Launch Configurable Keyboard is "designed to provide the ultimate user controlled keyboard experience, with open source mechanical and electrical design, open source firmware and associated software, and a large number of user configuration opportunities".

Some shots (click for gallery)

The units are being manufactured by System76 directly in their Denver, Colorado facility just like they do with their Thelio cases. The chassis for the System76 Launch Configurable Keyboard is milled from two solid blocks of aluminium, then powder coated for the fit and finish. They say that each "pocket, port, and hole is designed and precisely machined so that swapping switches and plugging in cables is easy and secure for the user".

Are you a fan of colourful patterns? Well good news on that front as each switch has an RGB LED that is independently controlled and so you can pick from different patterns. The whole configuration suite is open source too with the keyboard-configurator also up on GitHub and the firmware will be easily updatable with the fwupd project.

Would you be looking to buy one? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

Valve are yet again hitting the spotlight for the wrong reasons following the ruling from the EU Commission over geo-blocking , a lawsuit involving game pricing and now the Steam Controller too.

The lawsuit involved Ironburg Inventions (a subsidiary of Corsair Gaming), who have a patent for a game controller that has back paddles and they've held the patent since 2014. According to the press release , Valve lost the case and so "the jury unanimously found that Valve Corp infringed Ironburg’s 8,641,525 controller patent and awarded Ironburg over $4 million" additionally Valve were apparently aware of it and so the infringement was "willful". Due to this, there's a potential for "enhanced damages up to the statutory limit of treble damages" so the $4 million figure is only the beginning.

Any company that wishes to have back paddles, are then required to license the tech from Ironburg Inventions Ltd which is exactly what Microsoft does for their special Xbox Elite Controller.

The Steam Controller (sadly) was discontinued back in 2019. It was my favourite controller , and I still hope they bring out a proper second generation. Perhaps this was a big supporting reason for why they no longer continued with it? Probably not though, since they're now into VR hardware instead where there's likely a lot more monies.

If they do a second generation, perhaps they will be a little bit more careful with licensing next time and I will be first in line if they do another.

I still have my router although its resting now in a cupboard. As Lifehacker put it way back in 2006, it was the perfect way to turn your $60 router into a $600 router, which likely meant it was potentially costing Cisco money to have a device this good on the market.

The article below delves a lot into what happened with the outsourcing of code (3rd part sources are often a contentious issue for later resharing code as open source) and how especially in the early years proprietary companies thought they could just use anything and then lock it down and sell it. Some sloppy outsourcing work resulted in a treasure chest being opened. So true though that with the Tomato OS that I loaded on mine it was giving me $600 performance back then. I always felt crippled when I moved to newer routers and was really missing a lot of the functionality from Tomato OS.

See https://www.vice.com/en/article/qjpnpb/the-famous-router-hackers-actually-loved

#technology #hardware #opensource #linux

If System76 aren't your preferred Linux hardware vendor we also have TUXEDO who just recently announced the TUXEDO InfinityBook S 15 powered by the latest Intel hardware.

This new system actually sounds very familiar, and if you're feeling a bit of déjà vu you would be absolutely right - you've pretty much seen this before with the System76 Darter Pro . In fact, they're mostly the same. The main advantage is probably shipping, since System76 are based in the USA with TUXEDO in Germany and also support times / returns depending on where you are.

With a base configuration of the TUXEDO InfinityBook S 15 coming with a Full HD IPS display, Intel Core i5-1135G7 with Intel Iris Xe Graphics, 8 GB 3200 MHz DDR4 RAM, and a 250 GB Samsung 860 EVO. Their starting price is €937 EUR, compared with the $1,099 USD from System76.

With TUXEDO, you also get access to their fancy custom-built TUXEDO Control Center which allows you to get a full slick dashboard of your computer specifications. From here you can adjust performance profiles, fan tables and more depending on the model you buy from them. You also get their sweet looking backlit TUX super-key to replace the Windows logo you usually see from other vendors.

Here's some of the options you can get with it:

Operating system options are: TUXEDO_OS 20.04 LTS 64Bit (based on Ubuntu), Ubuntu 20.04 LTS 64bit or openSUSE 15.2 which you can pick between desktop environments for across KDE, Gnome and Xfce.

They said that the first deliveries will start at the end of February 2021 with pre-orders are available now. If you're interested you can take a full look at the TUXEDO InfinityBook S 15 here .

Looking to power up your Linux computing on the go or for around the hose? System76 have refreshed the Darter Pro with a brand new build powered by the latest tech.

Just like a lot of their recent hardware, it's coming filled with some great open source software too. System76 hooked up their new Darter Pro with their Open Firmware . This gives you coreboot and the EDK bootloader with System76 Firmware Apps. So say hello to fast boot times, better security and easy firmware updates from within the operating system.

"The Darter Pro has long been a customer favorite," says Sam Mondlick, VP of Sales. "We’re excited to reintroduce our users to this extremely versatile laptop with features that make it noticeably better than its already fantastic predecessor."

System76 claim it's a highly versatile machine for working on the go, with up to 9 hours battery life. Reasonably light too for moving around at 3.84 lbs / 1.74 kg. If you choose the option with Pop!_OS, the Linux distribution made by System76 then you also get all their built-in enhancements like the fun Auto-Tiling.

Here's some of the fancy tech specs for you:

Pricing starts at $1,099 and you can find the Darter Pro here .

ARM virtualization company Corellium has managed to get Ubuntu Linux running on the next-generation Apple M1.

The news comes from Corellium CEO, Chris Wade, who mentioned on Twitter how "Linux is now completely usable on the Mac mini M1. Booting from USB a full Ubuntu desktop (rpi). Network works via a USB c dongle. Update includes support for USB, I2C, DART. We will push changes to our GitHub and a tutorial later today.".

Impressive speedy work, and a separate project to the recently revealed Asahi Linux which is also aiming to do the same thing. Two heads are better than one, as they say. The Corellium team mentioned on Twitter they full back the Asahi project too, so it's wonderful to see true cooperation.

Right now this effort doesn't appear to have full GPU acceleration so it's doing software rendering, making it less suitable for a daily driver but work is ongoing towards that. Eventually everything will be in place, and it's taking far less time than I personally expected to see it running on such brand new hardware from Apple.

Thing thing is, as we noted in our article about the Asahi project, even Linux creator Linus Torvalds previously said in 2020 "I'd absolutely love to have one, if it just ran Linux" when talking about the new Apple M1 laptops.

You can see the code from Corellium up on GitHub .

Slimbook, the Linux friendly hardware company that offers Linux as a choice on their hardware has revealed the powerful Titan laptop that's ready for pre-orders. Coming as a result of the recent announcements of new CPUs from AMD and new GPUs from NVIDIA , this Titan combines them together into one unit.

With a good screen to make use of all that power too, they've not skimped on the details for the Titan. You get 15.6 inches, with a 2560x1440 resolution and 165Hz. Plenty of screen pixels for the powerful CPU/GPU combination to move around.

If, like me, you love a good bit a bling too it also comes with a per-key RGB backlit keyboard too. Not only is it colourful, it's an optical mechanical keyboard too for long-life and good response times. There's also a front RGB light bar, plus it's a full keyboard with a num pad too so you've got tons of space for easy typing.

Main Specifications:

Powerful, good looking and could be your next Linux laptop? You can order it with no operating system to load it all up yourself, or Ubuntu (Windows is a choice too).

As expected from the specifications it's got a big price to it too, with it starting at €1,750 which seems to be a special pre-order price so we expect it to be higher at main release.

You can check out the Titan here .

Today CES continues on with Intel and AMD having their announcements, and now it's NVIDIA up with the GeForce RTX 3060, plus lots of GeForce RTX laptops.

Ampere becomes a whole lot more affordable, as the GeForce RTX 3060 will succeed the GTX 1060 which was a very popular GPU due to the performance and price, with NVIDIA putting the GeForce RTX 3060 up for $329. It wasn't just the 1060 that was popular, the 2060 was also really popular with gamers (according to the Steam Survey ) so NVIDIA sure took their time getting this out.

RTX 3060's specifications:

• 13 shader-TFLOPs
• 25 RT-TFLOPs for ray tracing
• 101 tensor-TFLOPs to power NVIDIA DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling)
• 192-bit memory interface
• 12GB of GDDR6 memory

“There’s unstoppable momentum behind ray tracing, which has quickly redefined the new standard of gaming,” said Matt Wuebbling, vice president of global GeForce marketing at NVIDIA. “The NVIDIA Ampere architecture has been our fastest-selling ever, and the RTX 3060 brings the strengths of the RTX 30 Series to millions more gamers everywhere.”

NVIDIA will also be supporting " Resizable BAR " with the 30xx series, an advanced feature of PCI Express that can increase performance in games. It's not clear if this will work on Linux though.

When will the GeForce RTX 3060 be available? Soon! They say late February with stock speeds and factory overclocked units from top-tier vendors to be ready. However, expect stock issues as always.

On top of that lots of GeForce RTX 30 series laptops have been announced, with global availability expected later this month. Pricing will start at $999 (for the 3060 models) and they will have either the GeForce RTX 3060, GeForce RTX 3070 or the GeForce RTX 3080. NVIDIA also said they worked with partners to arrange many more laptops than ever before to come with at least 1440p displays so it's about to get a lot more common.