xkeeper

welcome to my personal hell

dragon warrior iii for the game boy color describes me as "stubborn", and i'm tempted to agree with that assessment


co-owner tcrf.net. i run an old forum, jul.
i've been around the internet since '01.
i generally feel like the internet
peaked somewhere around '07.


private: @xkeeper-PLUS
18+: @xkeeper-TI


plural / some kind of digital therian thing.
still discovering myself.
all of this is new to me.


discord / telegram
@xkeeper
signal
Xkeeper.99

poking at my devterm after a year or so and wondering what the latest updates and stuff for it are. this thing was a mess and the "clockworkpi stuff is low quality with very bad support" still seems true

the latest official image is from years ago (and undated in the github repo, thanks); there's armbian, but apparently this thing needs a bunch of kernel patches to function properly, like a hand-held portable terminal doesn't have working suspend and the top four pixels of the display are cut off because........

bluh


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in reply to @xkeeper's post:

I think it's tragic that they made it so small. If they'd designed the devterm to be the size of the TRS-80 model 100 it visually evokes, with proper mechanical keys, I'd be interested enough in using one to make some headway on the predictable embedded linux software flaws.

i don't mind the size as much as the quality is just.. jank. there are fundamental problems that come off of this thing.

the first time i took it out of the house, intending to play with it a little while we were out... the keyboard/mouse didn't work. yep! the power button did, so i had to hard reboot. i looked it up and apparently it just sucks so much that sometimes it just doesn't work because voltages or whatever -- problems you would think you'd have to solve to, you know, have a portable, battery-powered device.

also, suspend doesn't work. something kind of critical to a portable computing device. it just either hardlocks or does nothing, i forget which; someone was diving into the kernel to fix that issue and i don't know if it's available anywhere for use outside of their custom-built os image.

there's definitely some generic linux jank, and that's to be expected, but like. fuck. there's jank and then there's broken.

did you attempt and/or get any support at all? i'm kind of dreading reaching out but at the same time i don't like having what is effectively a paperweight laying around

I didn’t because due to “moving around the world” reasons I didn’t attempt to assemble it until I’d had it for many months, and it was pretty clear even before I bought it that their support is extremely minimal

btw what happened is that about five minutes after it booted, the SD card with the operating system violently ejected itself, and all future attempts also resulted in violent ejections anywhere from a few seconds to a few minutes afterwards, and I think that first ejection damaged something that caused the bootloader to just never quite work again anyway; it would hang very early in the process even when there was a perfectly good SD card that had not yet been ejected

(a different SD card, because when I say violently ejected, I mean I never found the first one even when I emptied out the apartment to move. it probably went straight under the dishwasher)

i'm glad that, if nothing else, they brought back the psp's umd launcher

i kinda regret even getting mildly excited for this thing again. it's just nothing but disappointment. :/