Episode: 4529
Title: yoga370 review
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4529/hpr4529.mp3
Transcribed: 2026-07-31 16:13:20 (official HPR transcript)

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4529, for 2025-12-11
Today's show is entitled, "yoga370 review"
The host is Brian-in-Ohio and the duration is 00:11:16
The flag is Clean, and the license is CC-BY-SA
The summary is "a laptop to rule them all"
Hello, Hacker Public Radio, Brian and Ohio here. I'm out from under my rock and I'm doing a non-fourth show for HPR.
It's great for this show came from episode 442 where I talked about I was looking for a single device to be able to do
fourth work and read documents and do web browsing and be able to take it on the road to have it be one device that does it all.
So the device I ended up using was a pine tab too and I discussed in that episode the ups and downs of using a pine tab too
about how I used flexbox and some scripts to bend the device to my needs.
About the device is underpowered and it had random crashes and I think development might be stopped on it.
So it's just not as good as I thought it would be.
Then in episode 4491 there was an interview with David Revo which I really enjoyed.
David Revo is the artist that does pepper and carrot.
In the episode they mentioned his blog post or his blog site and in that blog of his there's a section for hardware.
I clicked on there and it led me to this the discussion of the device he uses which is a Lenovo Yoba 370 and the different software he's installed on a pretty good blog post.
I had over there and read it.
So with that inspiration and with his words about the device I bought used Yoba 370 a Lenovo Yoba 370.
On eBay cost about $250 which is for the device you get pretty pretty inexpensive.
It's a two in one device so it can be used as a laptop or you can put the screen over and it becomes it.
It can be used as a tablet.
It has a 13 inch IPS touch screen.
Intel Core i7-7600 CPU that's got four cores.
It runs a 2.8 gigahertz.
The one I found on eBay had a 500 gigabyte NVMe 16 gigabytes of RAM and an offer to install Windows 11 audit if you were so desired.
I purchased the device came in a couple days which is still pretty amazing to me and it's.
I took it apart I opened up the back of it surprisingly it's very fixable.
It's got a replaceable battery nothing soldered in like some manufacturers do.
The memories pulls right out if you need to replace the NVMe it's not soldered in.
I've got some pictures of the inside of the device in a picture of it how it folds up if you're not sure what I'm talking about.
So after I bought it I do what I do with all my laptops.
I installed Slackware.
I don't do a boot anymore.
I don't.
And I don't destroy hot.
I've been a Slackware user for years since it's the distribution of choice.
And I quit doing this this time for sure I when the last laptop I purchased had Windows 10 and I and for a while I did dual boot it.
But now it's become such a hassle to dual boot and this one was even funnier when you opened it up and you.
Basically to install Windows 11 you have to log onto your network and then it must in must download the whole Windows system.
Anyway I didn't do any of that and so I just started out and had to get rid of.
The Windows installer essentially on that device which is surprisingly not that easy.
I took a little bit of work I had to stop secure boot in the BIOS which is normal.
And then in the end I had to reformat that hard drive completely.
I used the the Slackware installer as a live installation and it gives you the tools you need.
You need G disk which is a disk partitioner.
You need to use the make mkfs tools to create the.
The be fat partition for the for the boot sector and then the Linux section for the rest of the device.
A swap partition and a regular partition.
Slackware doesn't natively come with grub 2 it uses e-lilo for eFI booting which works fine for me.
You can install grub 2 but I've never have done that I gave up on grub 1 and went to grub 2.
And there's a link in the show notes about how to create an eFI system partition and that's a pretty helpful.
Post about how if you're going to do that with any other distribution.
I did have to reboot between each disk drive change so I've you know created the eFI boot sector reboot create the rest of the device.
That was how in the end I had to do it and that might not be that might be devices.
So if you're not sure but in the end I had a hard drive or an NVMe format or partition correctly and ready to go for the slackware installer which.
Does everything else for you it installs the system and installs the installs e-lilo it does a boot entry for the eFI partition and then the device starts right up.
When I did my normal post slackware install stuff and everything on the device works as normal.
Maybe not the fingerprint reader but I never used that anyway.
So I got slackware installed everything working and then I the next thing I did was I modified the scripts from the pintap 2 that I used to activate laptop and tablet mode.
And what I mean by that is in laptop the screens and landscape mode and tablet mode it's in portrait mode.
Instead of using us maybe a some kind of inertial sensor or something like that to for the device to automatically shift between these.
I for right now I just did it with some buttons that I created that are on the KDE task manager.
And so I with modifying the scripts in these scripts are just using x rander to rotate the screen x input to rotate the touch screen and the keyboard actually is disabled must be in hardware when you flip it in the screen all the way around the keyboard is disabled.
So modify those those scripts so that those x rander commands in x input commands will work for this device.
I created a couple of dot desktop entries added some some icon pictures for the buttons.
Pin them to the task manager and now I have two little buttons that once a tablet picture, once a laptop picture and I can press those and go from laptop to tablet mode really easily.
Well after that started working I was pleasantly surprised with a piece of software that comes with slack or when I come trouble with KDE I think is ocular.
Accular is a great document reader it will open just about anything and allows you to read and and look at different documents.
It just is a great piece of software.
And then I was pleasantly surprised that in tablet mode if you use presentation mode for ocular you can then configure it by going into the ocular configure settings in the presentation mode there's a enable touchscreen navigation and putting the device into tablet mode.
Opening up ocular whatever you want to read and then going to presentation mode it allows you to just tap the screen on the left and right edges to move forward and backwards and to the document that you're reading and then a little swipe down from the top you can get out of presentation mode pretty easily.
And it has a great feel and works just like in a e-reader.
Although it's a little bit bigger than a normal e-reader not tiny by any stretch of imagination but very nice especially if you're reading PDFs, data sheets and stuff like that.
The other kind of cool thing that I've just started playing with in tablet mode is a piece of software called.
It's a external plus plus it's a x-o-u-r-n-a-l plus plus I put a link in the show notes for the repository for that it's basically hand note taking software so.
It opens up it's got a piece of paper you know line piece of paper and then you can use the little stylus that the device comes with and you can draw and and take notes and I get and you can annotate PDFs and things like that.
I'm exploring the use use of this piece of software for doing things like d-charts, d-d-struct charts those were developed way back in the sixties I think by I think his name is letter dixtra who is a very famous famous computer scientist and the d-d-charts are flow charting system that's better than regular flow charts and I'm using it for.
Early forth development for before I start writing code I try to use d-charts to flow out the program that I'm developing.
I've got a link to an archive.org flow charting with d-charts by a guy from NASA, Donald Mayrow, something like that.
Love the device it's working great for me now it's it does it fits the need of being able to have a laptop and an e-reader all in one without having to bring extra devices it's powerful.
I can do all the forth development work in that I'm doing now very easily and just like usual slack where we're in perfect on it so.
With that I'd like to say if you have a piece of hardware a new laptop or something that you want to talk about or that you've just purchased why you'd record a show tell us about it why you love it why you don't love it whatever the case maybe.
If you have any questions or comments just go ahead and ask me and I'll get back to you and I just want to remind people let's all work to stamp out and abolish redundancy bye bye.
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