Entering dragon land—the Loongson laptop

If you follow any tech blogs or news sites, you’ve probably heard of the Loongson CPU, China’s home-grown processor which is always listed beside some unbelievable technical feats. The chip has been met with skepticism and curiosity mainly because, prior to this month at least, you could not get it.

That was until this month. The laptop I ordered two years ago finally arrived, now in the shape of a netbook bearing the latest Loongson 2F CPU. I’ve spent a week hacking on it, and have come to the conclusion that this is a really fun computer to own. It’s stable, passes the drop test, and is open enough where you can do … basically anything.

This laptop has an open source BIOS based on a souped-up pmon, which allows the user total access to the memory map. If you have the patience, you can go right in there and cause some trouble.

No matter how fun it is, this is not a laptop for regular users, and I believe Lemote is doing itself and incredibly disservice by marketing it as such. At first glance, it looks like something for the trash bin, but that’s until you start hacking.

Origins of the chip

Hu Weiwu began to develop the Loongson in 2002 at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Well, actually at the Institute of Computing Technology, but those are kind of attached. The first generation chip, a 32-bit almost-MIPS-compatible, was put into a handful of computers for rural children in Sichuan in 2006: the Sinomanic Tianhua GX series. These systems were similar to a Commodore64 and were basically keyboards that plugged into a TV and ran a bare bones Linux OS.

The first serious attempt at a Loongson-based PC was released by Lemote during Spring Festival 2007: the Fulong box. The Fulong is a super-compact computer in a box about the same size as a 5.25″ CD-ROM enclosure. The first box, the 2E, came with a 667MHz 64-bit Loongon CPU with a VIA southbridge and 256MB of RAM.

Lemote, a joint venture corporate arm made by the ICT to sell its chips, began to promote a new laptop that would use its Loongson 2E chip in fall 2007. I jumped on the pre-order opportunity but heard nothing until early 2008. After Asus launched its EeePC series, Lemote went back to the drawing board.

Last November, the company released a new Fulong box with a 1GHz Loongson 2F CPU running the new Xinhua Hualay RAYS 2.0 system, a Debian derivative produced for the Loongson.

We got a call the first week of January that my laptop, ordered so long ago, was now a netbook and I would have to come pick it up. Lemote only offers delivery to people who live in provinces in which it does not have a distribution house.

On a cold and gray Beijing morning I bundled up for the trek to go get my Loongson.

The Lemote store

Lemote’s Beijing office is located on 10 Kexueyuan Nan Li in Zhongguancun. That’s Haidian district. Great if you are a student, but sucks when you work in Chaoyang. The subway commute was one hour each way. Thankfully we have a new line: last year it would have been a two to three-hour bus trip.

I took the line from its second station to almost its last. After tying my shoes, I headed out the tunnel and into a neighborhood I had never seen before. Lemote’s storefront is on the east side of the street on the first floor of a small office building. Zhongguancun is full of these kinds of offices—they are where most IT companies house their service centers.

I didn’t get any photos inside the Lemote store because, well, I couldn’t. I only brought a fixed 50mm lens, and the store was so small I could not get back far enough to photograph anything meaningful.

The front windows have a series of displays showing off Loongson motherboards produced by Lemote, and also have some empty plastic imitations of the new netbook I was there to buy: the 8089-series Yeeloong. The 8089A, which I purchased for 2,110 yuan, is a 900MHz Loongson 2F with 512MB RAM and a 2GB SLC solid state drive. The alternative was an 8089B, the more popular model, which ups the RAM to 1GB and swaps the solid state drive with a bulky 160GB laptop hard disk. It also adds one USB port and a Web cam for 2,899 yuan.

On the left were two desks in front of the display shelf. The shelf showed off every Loongson motherboard produced in a series of black cubbyholes. The tables had five display computers.

The farthest left computer was a Fulong 2F box hooked up to a very large LCD screen. It was running RAYS as advertised, and was a lot of fun to play with. The other four computers were all black laptops. It turns out that the advertised laptops—the ones that came in black and white with paintings of bamboo on their covers—weren’t even made yet.

Ouch.

Not one to wait, I decided to get the black 8089A. The box said it was a 2GB SLC/8GB MLC, but I would find out later it was just 2GB. Ouch again, but at least it wasn’t a 2GB MLC. Single-Level Cell disks are much, much faster and much less prone to errors. I had a crisis once when using ReiserFS on my EeePC and learned my lesson.

Back to Marketing 101

If all you ever see is the Lemote Yeeloong as shipped by the company, then yes, it is a disappointing product.

First off, it is ugly like Brian Peppers. Uglier, in fact. At first glance, it looks like it is running KDE. That scared me, because running KDE on anything but the best hardware is madness. The window manager is a bloated mess, and the look of KDE 3.0 went out of fashion in 2002. Yet Everaldo’s Crystal icons, smiling up at me from a panel.

Well, I thought it was a panel.

It had Konqueror. It had Kterm. Everything except OpenOffice had a K in front of it. But then there was IceWeasel, which threw everything off. The setup is a bad mix of Gtk and Qt software, both totally unthemed.

The panel, I would also discover, was IceWM, which Lemote used to apply very cheap Luna borders to the windows. I will never understand the fetish Chinese developers have for Luna. Even my Lenovo cell phone had one truly ugly theme that looked like a hacked up “Luna for mobiles.”

As you might expect from this bad mash up, things
ran—to put it kindly—clunky. Windows dragged poorly, everything was slow, and the system was badly, badly crippled. Intentionally.

Lemote broke apt. They also broke dpkg. The filesystem is read only, which is probably why they weren’t too concerned about making the only possible user account “root.”

This disaster of a Debian setup is called “Lemote Loonux,” according to the boot menu.

While I was there, an old man was cursing about how he couldn’t watch movies on Youku because there was no Flash. It may be a bit of a leap, but I think it has something to do with the Luna theme. If you make something look too much like another product, people will expect it to function like that product. I anticipate this will disappoint a lot of Loongson users.

Service with a smile

The sales staff was exceptionally nice. I think Lemote knows that some of the people most interested in its products are foreigners. They got the box for me and walked me through filling out all the warranty cards.

On my way out, two somewhat geeky guys came in asking “Where are the new Loongsons!?” I thought to myself that these are the users Lemote should be trying to target: technically savvy users looking for a hobby system on which to hack.

I took the subway home and cracked open the box.

• Loongson 2F CPU at 900MHz (LIES! cpufreq reports a max of 797MHz, it’s the EeePC all over again!)
• 512KB L2 cache
• Loongson on-chip northbridge
• AMD CS5536 integrated controller (ISA, IDE, USB audio)
• 512MB DDRII RAM (what’s the max?)
• 2GB SLC solid state disk
• 8.9″ WSVGA LCD screen (1024×600)
• Silicon Motion SM712 LynxEM+ audio controller
• Realtek 8139 10/100 ethernet controller
• 802.11a/b/g Wifi adapter
• SD card reader
• 2x USB 2.0 ports
• VGA, speaker and mic output jacks
• 3-cell battery
• measures 25.5×18.8×2.5cm
• weighs 1kg (1.1kg with battery)

The computer comes with an extremely clear instruction manual, the netbook, a battery, power cord and power supply. The keyboard is snappy and responsive, thought I wish they had put the Fn key between CTRL and ALT instead of on the edge. It conflicts with the typing habits I acquired on my EeePC where it is now.

The plastic is very light, not as rubberized as the EeePC’s. It kind of has a “hollow” feeling to it that makes the laptop seem lighter even though it’s not.

The bottom has one large panel that unscrews to give easy access to the ram and hard disk in one shot. On my 8089A the bay is entirely empty except for the tiny SSD card soldered to a board with some IC chips and a female 2.5″ hard disk connector. The IC is a SM223TF, the same one used in the EeePC’s SSD, and the flash memory is produced by Hynix.

When you plug it in and fire it up, a Lemote BIOS screen comes up. The custom BIOS is based on pmon and has basically two options. It has an incredible debug mode that allows you to manually push files into the RAM and get a tty to their position. It attempts to find a “/boot/boot.cfg” on /dev/hda1 and uses it to create a boot menu. There is only one option in the menu: Lemote Loonux.

Marketing lessons

Lemote, in my opinion, really blew it on this package. They really should have taken a lesson from Apple, who long ago proved that all you need is creative branding to sell low-end hardware.

They had a big opportunity. New hardware. The first system from China. Lots of foreign geeks watching closely.

If they had rolled out Lemote Loonux with a look all their own, it could have really grabbed a niche in the hobbyist market. For an example of a distribution with successful branding, one needs look no further than Cannonical. Their Ubuntu began as nothing but a Debian hack, but its successful branding has over shadowed its parent among average users. Dell is even shipping it on its laptops.

There is no official Lemote or Loongson wallpaper. No unique colors or icons. Not even a consistent software offering. Why did they put on so many KDE applications when RAYS is mostly Gtk? It can’t be because of Chinese support, because IceWeasel is not Qt. I can think of few places Chinese input is more important than in a Web browser.

This laptop should have shipped with RAYS with a custom Lemote theme. This would give all Lemote products a similar look and feel—they already run on the same Debian packages. They also should have unlocked the filesystem to facilitate upgrades.

I kept Lemote’s OS for five hours before destroying it to start on my own using a Debian image. I’ve attached a few screenshots of my current setup to show just how much better this could have looked. I have twice as much software as the computer came with and almost every development header, and I still have 800MB of disk space free compared to the 320MB Lemote Loonux gave me.

To sum up my Yeeloong experience: I love the hardware, but hate the software. If you want a fun, non-x86 system to hack at, then Loongson is perfect for you.

Other posts of interest

• Let’s make a Mac at Zhongguancun!...