One of the main points when you are designing a laptop is the relationship between the motherboard and the enclosure. It is not a good idea to design the motherboard if you don’t have the chassis. At the same time, the enclosure has to take into account how the motherboard will be.

Now we are happy to announce that Slimbook will provide the enclosure we need for our Open Hardware PowerPC notebook. ACube and Slimbook are collaborating since the beginning of this year, exchanging information about components disposition and pinouts, thermal dissipation and so on.

ACube is a well known company with experience in creating PowerPC computers including Sam460ex and Sam460cr motherboards or the AmigaOne 500 desktop system.

Slimbook is having a great success selling their own Linux laptops (such as the ProX) and mini PCs world-wide.

Due to this collaboration we have almost everything we need to achieve our goal in terms of technology.

Electrical Schematics final version

We want to update you that first days of October we will publish in our repository the pdf containing the final version of the schematics. After that, during October, the Orca source will be available as well, tailored for the Slimbook chassis. This means that the design of the PCB will fit inside the Slimbook chassis.

In case you are able to convert Orca source to Kicad you are welcome to do it. If you have any issue when doing so, contact us and we will be happy to provide some help.

New ppc64 applications in our repo

Lastly, we have patched the following applications for ppc64 (Big Endian) : arcticfox, palemoon, mame, fs-uae, libx265, qemu, midori. They run on PowerMac/ImacG5 ( Power4 processor) but also on more recent Big Endian ppc64 processors such as NXP T2xxx and T4xxx.

We are also working on many other complex applications like Blender that require the creation of dedicated groups for the distribution of the necessary effort.

We’re performing tests, reporting bugs and suggesting workarounds to complete the installation of Debian 10.0 using ISOs released by the maintainers of Debian ports for ppc64be.

If you want to join the software workgroup and help these software tasks feel free to contact us.