Stormwyrm: 蛟龍

So I got a new gadget, a LicheePi Console 4A , a very small RISC-V laptop. I’m beginning to explore it and it’s a really sweet piece of gear. It reminds me of the Toshiba Libretto that I used to use, and it seems that unlike many of the ARM SoCs running GNU/Linux the GPU acceleration works just fine without any further tinkering.

The biggest problem it has is with software. RISC-V is a fairly new architecture and a lot of software is not available. There is no Discord client and while it might be possible to port Armcord, there are a lot of challenges. In particular while there is work being done to port Electron to RISC-V it is still in early stages. There is of course no build of the Arduino IDE but I guess it’s time to learn how to program Arduinos without it. I may need to build the OSS CAD Suite from source (to program another FPGA from Sipeed too) and many more things need to be built and ported. I suppose someone has to do it, and it might as well be me.

I’m a bit apprehensive about doing an apt-get dist-upgrade since for some reason the repository installs a new kernel without ACPI battery support so I lose the battery indicator, which is a serious problem if I’m to use it as a laptop. I’ve even heard reports that folks doing this have had their WiFi support removed. Probably need to see about who is running the repos that apt uses and possibly try to figure out how to build my own kernels with everything I need built in. In particular the kernels don’t seem to have support for my FIDO USB keys which is a pain.

Thermals are a smaller but significant problem, I’m getting like 60°C and the bottom gets really warm in use.

The other thing is that I’m not yet sure how to get it to detect the NVMe SSD that the thing came with. Looks like there’s a bit more assembly required.