Hi,

as indicated in [1] I was pretty intrigued by the GPD Micro PC, and since I lately actually bought one, I thought I should share my impressions here.
As a preface: I'll be talking about a lot of "problems", but really, they are rather nitpicks that either have to be expected with a device like that or are easy to solve or to adjust to.

Being a FLOSS zealot, my first question was: Where do I buy it? There was no way I'd buy it with Windows preinstalled. Fortunately, DragonBox Shop (think: Pandora, hopefully Pyra) sells it with Ubuntu. [2]
The shop was restructured recently and some things still need to be worked out. For example, it wouldn't let me order anything without unblocking some Amazon URLs. I wasn't wiling to do that, so I contacted the shop owner directly, who was very accommodating in that regard. So, @EvilDragon, in case you read this: Thanks again!

Due to some unforeseen "real-world circumstances" the last weekend lent itself to spending it with the GPD instead of my usual 12" subnotebook.

While Ubuntu is ok from a technical POV, I'm a Debian user. So I wanted to bring Debian to the device. "Buster" having recently been released made that a lot easier (I think). As a first step I only wanted to try Debian from a USB stick without overwriting the pre-installed Ubuntu.
Here's the first problem I found: The UEFI has an option to switch between EFI and legacy boot. But the legacy option doesn't seem to be working. If you select that one and try to boot from a legacy MBR stick, you'll only get into a reboot loop that brings you back to the UEFI. So EFI boot seems to be the only option. Fortunately Secure Boot is off by default.

Next "problem": You might know that there is a portrait display built into the device. So the Debian text installer will run sideways. That's no big deal. What is a big deal however is, that the internal keyboard won't work in the installer. So have a USB keyboard at hand! That works fine. From now on the installation works flawlessly. Of course, the Free Debian installer doesn't include any wifi firmware, so either attach a network cable (yay, great device! ) or use the unofficial Debian installer with firmwares!

Once you boot the installed system you'll notice, that the display lights up but stays blank. That's because Buster's kernel is too old. Afaik, you need kernel 5.2 for the display to work properly. You can either build that yourself, or in case you're lazy (as I am), you can use towo's Siduction kernel [3] as a stopgap until kernel 5.2 or newer shows up in Debian (preferrably as a buster-backport). Since the device runs fine except for the display, you can just ssh into it and install a newer kernel.
If you use towo's kernel, you should be aware however, that Buster includes gcc-8 while towo's kernel is built with gcc-9. That's not a problem right now but it might break at any time in the future. For now you just need an equivs dummy [4] that provides gcc-9, and a link from gcc-8 to gcc-9. Otherwise dkms won't work (e.g. for building VirtualBox kernel modules).

Now that you have a working display again, you'll notice that it's still sideways. There's two places where you have to adress this:
1. The framebuffer:
The pre-installed Ubuntu has these two kernel parameters in its grub configuration:The 2nd one actually rotates the framebuffer. I didn't investigate on what the 1st one does, but it doesn't seem to hurt.
2. The X server:
The Ubuntu installation just rotates the display via xrandr. I've heard that costs performance, but it's the way I would have gone too. I'm using lightdm as a login manager and you can rotate the whole X session via the lightdm.conf:
That's it pretty much on the software side. with an up-to-date kernel and a rotated display everything else is just plain old Debian.
With Xfce based on a minimal installation the battery monitor shows just under 8 hours when the device is idle, wifi on and the display in one of the lower settings. Suspend2RAM works fine btw.


Now to the hardware. Obviously, with its 6" this device is tiny for laptop standards. It's right in the middle of my N900 and my Asuss EEE 901 and that's exactly how it feels like. I have pretty good eyes so the Xfce desktop is still comfortable with only a slight increase of the DPI value from 96 to 110.
The display is pretty bright, so the lower settings are sufficient indoors. It opens up to an angle of about 145°, which, with respect to its size, is just about right when using it like a regular laptop. Given that the GPD is made for thumb typing and I want to hold it like my N900, I'd wish it opened a little more.

Of course the keyboard feels cramped, but other than that it's pretty decent. I often found myself subconsciously either admiring or dreading it, depending on whether I had the N900 or the EEE 901 in mind for comparison. I think GPD has pretty much made the best of it given the circumstances. The power key feels wobbly, but all the other keys are rather on the stiff side of comfortable.
As a German I'm not that used to qwerty keyboards but the layout makes a lot of sense. Except for the "6" key I'm not searching for keys on it any more than I do on regular qwerty keyboards.
The keyboard is backlit, unfortunately the device doesn't remember over reboots whether it was on or off. It always starts with the backlight being on. The "on" setting works like on the N900: Once you press a key the keys light up and go dark after some seconds without input. I just wish, the touchpad buttons in the upper left corner were backlit too. The touchpad itself doesn't feel great but it's ok. My main gripe with it is, that it seems to scroll "backwards" by default. In the Apple world they call this "natural scroll". This setting can be reversed in Xfce, so it shouldn't be a big deal, but ironically it seems Xfce applications don't care for this setting, while e.g. Firefox does.

The fan seems to only have two settings: on and off and I'm not aware of a way to software-control it. It produces a high-pitched slightly whiny sound and occasionally I think there is a very slight bearing noise. Fortunately there is a hardware switch to turn it off completely and although we had somewhere around 35°C around here, the fan doesn't seem to be needed. CPU and SSD temperatures lebel out at about 55°C whel idle, while moderate tasks bring both up to 60°C. I haven't run any synthetic tests yet, but the highest CPU temperature I've seen so far were 70°C, which was when decoding a FullHD video in software.
(edit: These temperatures are with the pre-configured 10W TDP. In the UEFI you can also chose 6 or 8W.)

There are 3 USB 3.0 type A ports. They seem to be built slightly differently than usual. Specifically, they are a bit more narrow on the outer edge. That means that regular USB devices sit pretty tightly, but I also have a USB stick with a special design (see [5] for reference) that doesn't fit at all.
The charger uses USB C and is rated at 3A@5V, 2.67A@9V, 2A@12V. I only can say that the port actually charges because I have no other USB C devices. The cable is only 1m long, which is way too short I think. Getting a longer one (2m) will be my first upgrade.
There came a very thin sleeve in the box that's actually just a plastic bag. Finding a suitable (not too big) sleeve/bag (mainly to keep the ports free of dust) is the next task. Some photo camera bags look promising.

The case is all plastic, but like with the EEE PCs or even more so, due to the size, this is not a problem at all. Everything feels pretty sturdy. Actually, the "real world circumstances" I mentioned in the beginning involved a 30km bicycle tour through moderately heavy terrain, during which the GPD was in a frame bag fixed to my unsuspended bicycle.
I've seen a photo somewhere that suggested that the hinge is only fixed on one side. I tried to wiggle the display to see if it's unstable, but within reasonable amounts of force there was nothing.

The µSD slot is mounted upside down but works fine. The headphone jack works as well. I have no experience with serial port hardware, so I can't really test that one.
4k output via HDMI works, but only at 30Hz. According to [6] it should work at 60Hz. I'm no sure if this is a software or a hardware thing.

Considering an SSD upgrade I opened the device (here's a video of someone doing it: [7]). Prying it open required quite some force, especially around the serial port, but it wasn't complicated.


[1] http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=100370&page=4#40
[2] https://www.dragonbox.de/en/mini-pcs...-running-linux
[3] https://packages.siduction.org/
[4] https://packages.debian.org/buster/equivs
[5] https://www.legitreviews.com/corsair...ive-review_784
[6] https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us...-2-40-ghz.html
[7] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjyNEKFwE4s

I like the device so far, except I find it slightly difficult to do fn-combinations when the only fn-key is on the left side of the keyboard. But otherwise I like the device. Haven't installed any Linux distros yet. Officially supported Linux (Ubuntu MATE 19.10) will be (or is supposed to be) released this October.

Other downside is that there seems to be no quick way to type scandic characters such as ö, ä or å with Windows, or at least the keyboard I chose when I ran through OOBE (first run experience) is not easily changed...

And yes, I will definitely change the ssd, maybe I will use your video as a walk-through

I have a solution for the touchpad scroll direction now:

The touchpad doesn't identify as a touchpad but as a mouse and it's also not compatible with either th synaptics or elantech drivers.

According to [1], with libinput you can invert the scroll direction of any pointer devices. That actually works here, but of course that also reverses the scroll direction of a regular mouse, which I don't want. So I need to limit that global configuration again.
My first attempt was to change the MatchDevicePath line like this, becaue Xorg.0.log told me, that the touchpad registered as "event2":That worked, but unfortunately these pathes are not stable.
Then, in [2] I found, that one can address devices also by product name. So I now have this solution:

[1] https://askubuntu.com/questions/8196.../820098#820098
[2] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Input..._configuration

It's really just about the kernel. So as long as you install 5.2, any distro that works with it should work.

As a German I'm in the same boat with my Umlauts and ß.

I did the following hack to adress this:
The device has a us qwerty layout which I don't want to mess with. But I'm never going to need the gb layout here, so I can break this.
I copied /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/us to /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/gb and made the following changes:
The last line turns my (useless - at best) CapsLock key into an AltGr key and assings lower case Umlauts and ß to the AltGr level of their respective base characers (so Caps + a becomes ä etc.). Upper case letters are assigned to the key right below their base key (Caps + z = Ä).
Now all I have to do is to load the gb layout in Xfce and I have all the extra characters I need.

(edit: And I also changed Xfce's default key for closing windows from Alt + F4 to Alt + 4 because I didn't like pressing that extra Fn key in the process, especially since there is the Super key in between which means one can't press both Alt and Fn with the same finger.)

It's not "my" video.
(No) credit, where (no) credit is due please!


edit2:
To maximize the amount of desktop space that's available for window content, I have Xfce disable window decorations on maximized windows.
I use windowck-plugin [1] instead. Unfortunately that isn't available in Debian, so I have to build it myself. I'll attach my deb package here so you don't have to.


[1] https://goodies.xfce.org/projects/pa...indowck-plugin

Hmm.. a Toughbook 31 Mk5 or this thing. :thinking:

There are daily builds of Ubuntu Mate 19.10 [1] and the live image seems to work fine.
There's sound, OpenGL and Wifi. You'll still have to rotate the display though and the touchpad scrolls backwards too.

@Thoke:
Does the touchpad scroll backwards under Windows as well?


[1] http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-mat...-live/current/

I swaped the 128GB SSD for a 512GB one and it works fine. To be precise, it's a Transcend M.2 SSD 430S 512GB (TS512GMTS430S) [1], simply because it was the cheapest and biggest compatible SSD I could find.

I also found a matching bag or rather case. It's a RivaCase 7511, which has a hard shell. [2]
According to [3] the dimensions of the GPD are 153x113x23.5mm, which is almost identical to what I measured (155x110x25mm).
The RivaCase is supposed to have interior dimensions of 160x110x45mm, so it's pretty close.
Unfortunately when the case arrived, I found it could either fit the GPD in width or in depth, but not both at the same time.
So I decided to brick it (see photo! ) and now it fits perfectly.
The power adapter is 25mm thick, so in theory it shouldn't fit in the 45mm height of the case as seen in the photo, even if we account for the 23.5/25mm of the GPD being measured at the hinge. But it does. I can feel the power adapter touching the GPDs lid when closing the case, but I don't have to apply any pressure.
For the moment I need some flat tool (e.g. the bottle opener of my swiss knive) to slightly lever the GPD out of the case. Let's see if it gets better over time. I just hope it won't get worse.
(edit: The GPD has two VESA screw holes on the bottom. One of them is pretty much in the center. I put a screw in it and attached an old lanyard I had left over from a camera. By this lanyard I can now easily pull the device out of the case.)
The black cable in the case is a slightly thicker 2m cable I bought. You can see the original white 1m cable on top of the bricks for reference.
On a side note, the RivaCase and an N900 in the CP-321 leather cover fit pretty nicely into Ortlieb's medium size "Saddle Bag Two 1.6L"). [4]

Kernel 5.2 has arrived in Debian unstable and it's based on gcc8. [5] I haven't tried it yet, but you should be able to install it under buster without the equivs dummy I had to use for towo's kernel.
The first update of Buster, 10.1, is scheduled for 7th of September [6]. I'd expect a buster-backport for the kernel around the same date, so you won't have to mix releases anymore.


[1] https://www.transcend-info.com/Products/No-981
[2] https://geizhals.eu/rivacase-7511-ac...-a1473584.html
[3] https://www.tomshardware.com/news/gp...ecs,38420.html
[4] https://www.ortlieb.com/de/saddlebag-two
[5] https://packages.debian.org/sid/linu...amd64-unsigned
[6] https://lists.debian.org/debian-deve.../msg00000.html

Buster 10.1 is out now and as expected, there is also a recent enough backports kernel available. [1]
So there's no need for custom or 3rd party kernels anymore.


[1] https://packages.debian.org/buster-b...ux-image-amd64
[2] https://www.tomshardware.com/news/in...ure,40362.html

Hi Sulu,

Yes, that sucks, I read about this ****-up by Intel (one more to add to the pile) yesterday as well. According to this official document not all Apollo Lake CPU's are affected, but specifically these:

Celeron-series: N3350, J3355, J3455
Pentium-series: N4200.

(so the series mentioned in the document, without the appended 'E', since the appended 'E' indicates the fixed version)

If the MicroPC does indeed have one the above mentioned, I would try to contact GPD about this problem anyway. Perhaps if they can make a big enough case, they can demand new CPU's from Intel, in which case you could return your MicroPC to GPD for repair so that they can replace the CPU or mainboard.

Good luck with the situation anyhow, real big bummer indeed for all MicroPC owners if the included CPU is one of the affected ones

Edit:
According to GPD's MicroPC specifications page, the MicroPC houses a (Pentium) N4100 CPU, so I think you might be in luck

I know ...

... but somehow I remembered the Micro PC to sport an N4200, not an N4100.
Since I don't have the device here right now, I've spent the past 5 minutes searching the web for a cpuinfo output, and luckily, it seems I remembered incorrecty. [1]
So thanks for the heads-up!


[1] https://gist.github.com/m-shibata/a1...5166a344849a77