I rarely replace computers… I’ll replace something when it is no longer able to perform its usual duty, or if I feel it might decide to abruptly resign anyway. For the last 10 years, I’ve been running a Panasonic CF-53 MkII as my workhorse, and it continues to be a reliable machine.

I just replaced the battery in it, so I now have two batteries, the original which now has about 1.5-2 hours of capacity, and a new one which gives me about 6 hours. A nice thing about that particular machine is it still implements legacy interfaces like RS-232 and Cardbus/PCMCIA. I’ve upgraded the internal storage to a 2TB SSD and replaced the DVD burner with a Blu-ray burner. There is one thing though it does lack which didn’t matter much prior to 2020: an internal microphone. I can plug a headset in, and that works okay for joining in on work meetings, but if there’s a group of us, that doesn’t work so well.

The machine is also a hefty lump to lug around due to being a “semi-rugged”. There’s also no webcam, not a deal breaker, but again, a reflection of how we communicate in 2023 vs what was typical in 2013.

Given I figured it “didn’t owe me anything”… it was time to look at a replacement and get that up and running before the old faithful decided to quit working and leave me stranded. I wanted something designed for open-source software ground-up this time around. The Panasonic worked great for that because it was quite conservative on specs — despite being purchased new in 2013, it sported an Intel IvyBridge-class Core i5, whereas the latest and greatest was the Haswell generation. Linux worked well, and still does, but it did so because of conservatism rather than explicit design.

Enter the StarBook Mk VI. This machine was built for Linux first and foremost. Windows is an option, that you pay extra for on this system. You also can choose your preferred CPU option, and even choose your preferred boot firmware, with AMI UEFI and coreboot (*Intel models only for now) available.

Figuring, I’ll probably be using this for the better part of 10 years from now… I aimed for the stars:

• CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 5800U 8-core CPU with hyperthreading
• RAM: 64GiB DDR4
• SSD: 1.8TB NVMe
• Boot firmware: coreboot
• OS: Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (used to test the machine then install Gentoo)
• Keyboard Layout: US
• Power adapter: AU with 2m USB-C cable

         -/oyddmdhs+:.                stuartl@vk4msl-sb 
     -odNMMMMMMMMNNmhy+-`             ----------------- 
   -yNMMMMMMMMMMMNNNmmdhy+-           OS: Gentoo Linux x86_64 
 `omMMMMMMMMMMMMNmdmmmmddhhy/`        Host: StarBook Version 1.0 
 omMMMMMMMMMMMNhhyyyohmdddhhhdo`      Kernel: 6.5.7-vk4msl-sb-… 
.ydMMMMMMMMMMdhs++so/smdddhhhhdm+`    Uptime: 1 hour, 15 mins 
 oyhdmNMMMMMMMNdyooydmddddhhhhyhNd.   Packages: 2497 (emerge) 
  :oyhhdNNMMMMMMMNNNmmdddhhhhhyymMh   Shell: bash 5.1.16 
    .:+sydNMMMMMNNNmmmdddhhhhhhmMmy   Resolution: 1920x1080 
       /mMMMMMMNNNmmmdddhhhhhmMNhs:   WM: fvwm3 
    `oNMMMMMMMNNNmmmddddhhdmMNhs+`    Theme: Adwaita [GTK2/3] 
  `sNMMMMMMMMNNNmmmdddddmNMmhs/.      Icons: oxygen [GTK2/3] 
 /NMMMMMMMMNNNNmmmdddmNMNdso:`        Terminal: konsole 
+MMMMMMMNNNNNmmmmdmNMNdso/-           Terminal Font: Terminus (TTF) 16 
yMMNNNNNNNmmmmmNNMmhs+/-`             CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 5800U (16) @ 4.507GHz 
/hMMNNNNNNNNMNdhs++/-`                GPU: AMD ATI Radeon Vega Series / Radeon Vega Mobile Series 
`/ohdmmddhys+++/:.`                   Memory: 4685MiB / 63703MiB 
  `-//////:--.

First impressions

The machine arrived on Thursday, and I’ve spent much of the last few days setting it up. I first checked it out with the stock Ubuntu install: the machine boots up into an installer of sorts, which is good as it means you set up the user account yourself — there’s no credentials loose in the box. Downside is you don’t get to pick the partition layout.

The machine, despite being ordered with coreboot boot firmware, actually arrived with AMI boot firmware instead. Apparently the port of coreboot for AMD systems is still under active development, and I’m told there will be a guide published describing the procedure for installing coreboot. Minor irritation, I was looking forward to trying out coreboot on this machine — but not a show-stopper… I look forward to trying the guide when it becomes available.

The machine itself felt quite zippy… but then again, when you’re used to a ~12-year-old CPU, 8GB RAM and a 2TB SATA-II SSD for storage, it isn’t much of a surprise that the performance would be a big jump.

Installing Gentoo

After trying the machine out, I booted up a SysRescueCD USB stick and used gparted to shove-over the Ubuntu install into the last 32GiB of the partition, then proceeded to create a set of partitions for Gentoo’s root, a 80GiB swap partition (seems a lot, but it’s 64GiB for suspend-to-disk plus 16GiB for contingencies) some space for a /home partition, some LVM space for VMs, and my Ubuntu install right at the end.

I booted back into Ubuntu, and used it as my environment for bootstrapping Gentoo, that way I could experience how the machine behaved under a heavy load. Firefox was, not bad, under the circumstances. My only gripe being the tug-o-war between Ubuntu insisting that I use their Snap package, and me preferring a native install due to the former’s inability to respect my existing profile settings. This is a weekly battle I have with the office workstation.

In discussing with Starlabs Systems, they mentioned two possible gremlins to watch out for, WiFi (important since this machine has no Ethernet) and the touch pad.

I used a self-built Gentoo stage 3, unwittingly I used one built against the still-experimental 23.0 profiles, which meant it used a merged /usr base layout… but we’ll see how that goes anyway… since it’s the direction that Debian and others are going anyway. So far, the only issue has been the inability to install openrc and minicom together since both install a runscript binary in the same place.

Once I had enough installed to be able to boot the Gentoo install, including building a kernel, I got the boot-loader installed, re-configured UEFI to boot that in preference to Ubuntu, then booted the new OS.

First boot under Gentoo

OS boot-up was near instantaneous. I’m used to about 10-15 seconds spent, but this took no time at all.

WiFi worked out-of-the-box with kernel 6.5.7, but the touch pad was not detected. Actually, under X11 the keyboard was unresponsive too because I forgot to install the various drivers for X.org. Oops! I sorted out the drivers easy enough, but the touch pad was still an issue.

Troubleshooting the touch pad

To get the touch pad working, I ended up taking the Ubuntu kernel config, setting NVMe and btrfs to being built-in, and re-built the whole thing again… took a long time, but success, I had the touch pad working.

The tricky bit is the touch pad is a I²C device connected via the AMD chipset, and described in the ACPI. Not quite sure how this will work under coreboot, but we’ll cross that bridge later. I spent a little time today refining the kernel down a little from the everything kernel that Ubuntu use… to something a little more specific. Notably, things you can’t directly plug into this machine (like ISA/PCI/PCIe cards, CardBus/PCMCIA, etc) or interfaces the machine did not have (e.g. floppy drive, 8250 serial), I took out. Things that could conceivably be plugged in like USB devices were left in.

It took several tries, but I got something that’s workable for this hardware in the end.

Final kernel configuration

The end result is this kernel config. Intel StarBook users might be better off starting with the Ubuntu kernel config like I did and pare it back, but that file may still give you some clues.

Thoughts

Whilst compiling, this machine does not muck around… being a 8-core SMT machine it actually builds things quite rapidly, although on this occasion I gave the machine a helping hand on some bigger packages like Chromium by using a pre-built binary built for my other machines.

Everything I use seems to work just fine under Gentoo… and of course, having copied my /home from the Panasonic (you never realise how much crap you’ve got until you move house!), it was just a little tweaking of settings to suit the newer software installed.

I’m yet to try it out a full day running on the battery to see how that fares. Going flat-chat doing builds it only lasted about 2 hours, but that’s to be expected when you’ve got the machine under a heavy load.

Zoom sees the webcam and can pick up the microphone just fine. I expect Slack will too, but I’ll find that out when I return to work (ugh!) in a fortnight.

My only gripe right now is that my right pinkie finger keeps finding the SysRq/PrintScreen button when moving around with the arrow keys… been used to that arrow cluster being on the far-right of the keyboard not one row back like this one. Other than that, the keyboard seems reasonable for typing on. The touch pad not being recessed sometimes picks up stray movements when typing, but one can disable/enable it pretty easily via Fn+F10 (yes, I have Fn-lock enabled). The keyboard backlight is a nice touch too.

The lack of an Ethernet port is my other gripe, but not hard to work-around, I have a USB-C “dock” that I bought to use with my tablet that gives me 3×USB-3A, full-size SD, microSD, 2×HDMI, Ethernet and audio out and pass-through USB-C for charging. The Ethernet port on that works and the laptop happily charges through it, so that works well enough.

The power supply for this thing is tiny, 65W with USB-A and USB-C ports. I also tried charging this laptop with a conventional USB-A charger but it did not want to know (the PSU probably doesn’t do USB PD). Should be possible to find a 12V-powered USB-C charger that will work though.

The Toughbook will likely be my go-to on camping trips and WICEN events, despite being a heavier and bigger unit, as usually I’m not lugging the thing around, it’s better ruggedised for outdoor activities, and it’s also looks about 10 years older than it really is, so not attractive to steal.

My father does a lot of Scottish Country dancing, he was a treasurer for the Clan MacKenzie association for quite a while, and a president there for about 10 years too. He was given a task for making some ball tickets, but each one being uniquely numbered.

After hearing him swear at LibreOffice for a bit, then at Avery’s label making software, I decided to take matters into my own hands.

First step was to come up with a template. The programs were to be A6-size booklets; made up of A5 pages folded in half. For ease of manufacture, they would be printed two to a page on A4 pages.

The first step was to come up with the template that would serve as the outer and inner pages. The outer page would have a placeholder that we’d substitute.

\documentclass[a5paper,landscape,16pt]{minimal}
\usepackage{multicol}
\setlength{\columnsep}{0cm}
\usepackage[top=1cm, left=0cm, right=0cm, bottom=1cm]{geometry}
\linespread{2}
\begin{document}
\begin{multicols}{2}[]

\vspace*{1cm}

\begin{center}
\begin{em}
We thank you for your company today\linebreak
and helping to celebrate 50 years of friendship\linebreak
fun and learning in the Redlands.
\end{em}
\end{center}

\begin{center}
\begin{em}
May the road rise to greet you,\linebreak
may the wind always be at your back,\linebreak
may the sun shine warm upon your face,\linebreak
the rains fall soft upon your fields\linebreak
and until we meet again,\linebreak
may God gold you in the palm of his hand.
\end{em}
\end{center}

\vspace*{1cm}

\columnbreak
\begin{center}
\begin{em}
\textbf{CLEVELAND SCOTTISH COUNTRY DANCERS\linebreak
50th GOLD n' TARTAN ANNIVERSARY TEA DANCE}\linebreak
\linebreak
1973 - 2023\linebreak
Saturday 20th May 2023\linebreak
1.00pm for 1.30pm - 5pm\linebreak
Redlands Memorial Hall\linebreak
South Street\linebreak
Cleveland\linebreak
\end{em}
\end{center}

\begin{center}
\begin{em}
Live Music by Emma Nixon \& Iain Mckenzie\linebreak
Black Bear Duo
\end{em}
\end{center}

\vspace{1cm}

\begin{center}
\begin{em}
Cost \$25 per person, non-dancer \$15\linebreak
\textbf{Ticket No \${NUM}}
\end{em}
\end{center}
\end{multicols}
\end{document}

The inner pages were the same for all booklets, so we just came up with one file that was used for all. I won’t put the code here, but suffice to say, it was similar to the above.

So we had two files; ticket-outer.tex and ticket-inner.tex. What next? Well, we needed to make 100 versions of ticket-outer.tex, each with a different number substituted for $NUM, and rendered as PDF. Similarly, we needed the inner pages rendered as a PDF (which we can do just once, since they’re all the same).

#!/bin/bash
NUM_TICKETS=100

set -ex

pdflatex ticket-inner.tex
for n in $( seq 1 ${NUM_TICKETS} ); do
	sed -e 's:\\\${NUM}:'${n}':' \
            < ticket-outer.tex \
            > ticket-outer-${n}.tex
	pdflatex ticket-outer-${n}.tex
done

This gives us a single ticket-outer.pdf, and 100 different ticket-inner-NN.pdf files that look like this:

Now, we just need to put everything together. The final document should have no margins, and should just import the relevant PDF files in-place. So naturally, we just script it; this time stepping every 2 tickets, so we can assemble the A4 PDF document with our A5 tickets: outer pages of the odd-numbered ticket, outer pages of the even-numbered ticket, followed by two copies of the inner pages. Repeat for all tickets. We also need to ensure that initial paragraph lines are not indented, so setting \parindent solves that.

This is the rest of my quick-and-dirty shell script:

cat > tickets.tex <<EOF
\documentclass[a4paper]{minimal}
\usepackage[top=0cm, left=0cm, right=0cm, bottom=0cm]{geometry}
\usepackage{pdfpages}
\setlength{\parindent}{0pt}
\begin{document}
EOF
for n in $( seq 1 2 ${NUM_TICKETS} ); do
	m=$(( ${n} + 1 ))
	cat >> tickets.tex <<EOF
\includegraphics[width=21cm]{ticket-outer-${n}.pdf}
\includegraphics[width=21cm]{ticket-outer-${m}.pdf}
\includegraphics[width=21cm]{ticket-inner.pdf}
\includegraphics[width=21cm]{ticket-inner.pdf}
EOF
done
cat >> tickets.tex <<EOF
\end{document}
EOF
pdflatex tickets.tex

The result is a 100-page PDF, which when printed double-sided, will yield a stack of tickets that are uniquely numbered and serve as programmes.