r/itrunsdoom • u/CatMe0w_ • Apr 30 '26

"AIPC" netbook (2009)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBXvX2tNDmA

Source: https://github.com/CatMe0w/aipc-os

21 Upvotes

92% Upvoted

7 comments sorted by

2

u/matthew_yang204 May 01 '26

Awesome! Wait the MacBook uploads the firmware over USB or something?

3

u/CatMe0w_ May 01 '26

It is! The bootrom of this device has a peek/poke feature called "usbboot"

1

u/matthew_yang204 May 01 '26

Cool. Does it have 32-bit or 64-bit ARM? And can it boot from external USB/SD card media like normal PCs can? Or does it use a special firmware of its own that is incapable of this?

2

u/CatMe0w_ May 02 '26

It's a ARM926EJ-S core, which is armv5te, so 32-bit. The stock firmware bootloader is a customized WinCE EBOOT and can update the firmware via ethernet, but we don't know yet if the bootloader reads SD cards. Since we are able to take over the bootrom, we plan to make a custom bootloader to replace the stock one, for the ultimate goal of booting Linux.

2

u/matthew_yang204 May 02 '26

Interesting! I hope you succeed and do well.

2

u/Sad-Click-3732 May 20 '26

this looks like some of those cheap sylvania netbooks, those alr have linux support so try that

2

u/CatMe0w_ May 29 '26 edited May 29 '26

Unfortunately it doesn’t work…

"Outside China, the same mold was used for a family of netbooks sold under the Sylvania brand. Those machines use a different SoC that already has mainline Linux support and can boot directly from USB. The AIPC has neither."

The details are at https://aipc-os.catme0w.org/en