Harry's Lemote Yeeloong Page

The Lemote Yeeloong is a Chinese-manufactured mips64el netbook that I now own (and love quite dearly).

It has a few unique advantages over other netbooks:

• It uses the mips64el architecture and the Loongson processor.
• It has free boot firmware (also known as BIOS) known as PMON2000. As far as I know, this is the only laptop in the world that can claim that.
• All of its components are 100% compatibile with free drivers. Once again, AFAIK this is the only laptop in the world to possess this trait. You can also be ensured that everything from webcam to WLAN will be in working order on GNU/Linux distributions.
• RMS uses this laptop. If you're into that sort of thing, that is.

I'll also list the common advantages:

• This thing is small. Like, tiny.
• Despite its size, I found the keyboard quite pleasant to type on; the keys have a nice bezel (although pressing the right shift key takes some getting used to).

Of course, it also has some unique disadvantages:

• If you live in the US, it can be rather difficult to get. The only way for a random US bloke to get one at the moment is to import it from Europe through the Tekmote Electronics distributor. If you need help with this, contact me.
• It can't run current versions of Windows because they're only compiled for x86-based processors (and more recently ARM). This could also be seen as an advantage.
• It only comes with 1GB of RAM and one slot. The theoretical max is 2GB RAM, but it's also very peculiar about the type of RAM it uses, and I haven't seen anyone successfully find a compatible RAM stick and upgrade it yet.

And like any laptop, it has common disadvantages:

• The builtin touchpad is rather fidgety no matter my Xorg sensitivity settings. Of course, I just use the external USB mouse that came with the latop most of the time anyways.
• The fan speed is rather fast and loud by default, and even though one can change it I find that the base gets quite hot unless it's at the default 4300 RPM.
• Builtin webcam, but no builtin microphone. So much for Ekiga. Of course it has a microphone port for an external one, but ain't nobody got time for that.

I've developed some quick bash scripts for it:

setfanspeed -- Set fan speed and display battery temperature

#!/bin/bash
echo $1 > /sys/class/hwmon/hwmon0/pwm1
thinkfan
echo battery temperature is $(cat /sys/devices/virtual/power_supply/yeeloong-bat/temp)

Requires thinkfan to be installed.
Called with setfanspeed [number], where [number] is either 0, 1, 2, or 3.
The numbers roughly correspond to these fan speed values:

Mostly stolen from Roman Mamedov.

bat -- Perform various battery-related tasks

#!/bin/bash
if [ $1 ]
then
        if [ $1 == "temp" ]
                then cat /sys/devices/virtual/power_supply/yeeloong-bat/temp
        fi
        if [ $1 == "status" ]
        then
                echo "max charge:" $(cat /sys/class/power_supply/yeeloong-bat/charge_full)
                echo "current charge:" $(cat /sys/class/power_supply/yeeloong-bat/charge_now)
        fi
        if [ $1 == "set" ]
        then
                if [ $2 == "powersave" ]
                then
                        echo powersave > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_governor
                        echo "set to power-saving mode"
                fi
                if [ $2 == "maxpower" ]
                then
                        echo conservative > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_governor
                        echo 797000 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_max_freq
                        echo "set to high-performance mode"
                fi
        fi
fi
if [ ! $1 ]
then
        echo "options:"
        echo "   temp           to show temperature"
        echo "   status         to show status"
        echo "   set [mode]     sets mode, where [mode] can be:"
        echo "      maxpower    to set to high-performance, short-battery mode"
        echo "      powersave   to optimize for longer battery life"
        echo ""
        echo "most of this was taken from:"
        echo "   http://delqn.com/yeeloong/yeeloong.md"
fi

Luckily, this one is self-documenting.