Comment by 🐙 norayr
Re: "Hey everyone. I'm looking for a cheap used laptop that's "…"
wait, is alphasmart supported by openbsd?
2025-11-03 · 6 months ago
5 Later Comments ↓
🐙 norayr · 2025-11-03 at 21:20:
speaking of aa batteries, there in devterm, and they prepare uconsole, it can be preordered.
both require 8 aa batteries.
i researched at some point and came to conclusion that risc-v option is the most power efficient.
it is a very cool device, i think i would enjoy using it.
🐙 norayr · 2025-11-03 at 21:23:
but yes i don't thitk it is supported by openbsd.
i know certainly that people were using pinebooks with openbsd, and wait, i think one of the socs for devterm is same rockchip soc used in pinebook pro. so maybe you can manage to install openbsd on it. or check if someone did it.
but to me it is interesting that devterm can use low power risc-v and i estimated it would run for 6-8 hours on 8 AA batteries.
🐙 norayr · 2025-11-03 at 21:26:
not for openbsd but i can suggest getting some old motorola phone like bionic, droid4, atrix, something supported by maemo leste, and motorola lapdock.
lapdock has its own battery, so you can run devuan linux on the phone and use it by plugging to the lapdock as infinite life arm laptop.
👻 darkghost · 2025-11-03 at 23:20:
The alphasmart should be supported by OpenBSD. When you plug it in, it becomes an HID (human interface device) keyboard. Then you push the send button and it "types" out the file contents. There is a setting on the alphasmart for how fast it does this. Ingenious way of ensuring device compatibility so long as you have a USB A port.
I get about 8 hours on my Thinkpad T480 running OpenBSD, they tend to be a bit cheaper than X1 Carbons I think. I primarily use it for writing short stories and blog posts, actually.
Original Post
Hey everyone. I'm looking for a cheap used laptop that's "perfectly" supported by OpenBSD. I only plan to use it to write my short stories with, so my requirements aren't high at all, but I would like as good of battery life as I can get. Does anyone have any suggestions? I know Thinkpads are the standard advice, but I think an X1 Carbon or whatever is still overkill for this, so a specific, older recommendation that can still run the newest version would be great.