Pine64's e-Paper tablet now booting mainline Linux
That's right. An e-Ink tablet that you can run Neofetch on.
Pine64 may be best known for their ARM powered laptops, inexpensive, Linux powered phones, and watches… but did you know they also sell an e-Paper tablet?
The PineNote is a fascinating little tablet. 1.8GHz CPU. 4GB of RAM. And… an e-Ink, grayscale display.
Think of the PineNote as a cross between an Amazon Kindle… and an iPad. Running open source software.
Just one teensy, tiny little problem… at the moment there is no stable, default operating system for the PineNote. Well that appears to be on the verge of changing. Check out this screenshot:
Oh, yeah, baby. That, right there, is mainline Linux kernel running Alpine Linux on a PineNote.
NeoFetch. On an e-Ink display.
I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want that in my life. Just gorgeous.
The work on getting this hardware supported in mainline Linux is thanks, in large part, to developer Sam Holland. You can find much of this work here on GitHub.
So… begs the question… can we order a PineNote and install Linux right now? Well… according to Pine64:
So maybe not quite there for most people. But progress is clearly being made. And the possibilities of a full Linux desktop system running on an e-Ink tablet are absolutely tantalizing.
Have you subscribed to The Lunduke Journal yet? Doing so now will give you full access to attend LundukeFest as well as download a rather hefty pile of DRM-Free eBooks.
That’s something you want in your life. Very much.
I prefer the PineNote to the PineTab because it has an USB-C port instead of a Micro-USB port. I don't want to ever change the direction on the cable to get it fit into the plug again.