Toposh T163

185 × 141 × 20 mm, 635 g

Even smaller than my Gateway Handbook 486 and weighs half as much. $300 on Ali Express. Intel Celeron J4125, 12 GB ram, 500 GB ssd. I got this in January 2023 for a trip to Antarctica. The cramped keyboard takes some getting used to but it's capable of doing everything I need on the road as long as I'm not doing a lot of writing. It uses almost no power, the battery runs forever and the power supply is just a little wall wart. It has many quirks, few of which are actual bugs but it does require lots of workarounds.

Rotated screen

The screen is rotated a quarter turn counter-clockwise, so the top of the image is at the left edge of the screen. I rotated the console back with the linux kernel option fbcon=rotate:1, and X with xrandr -o right. I did not try to rotate grub. The screen is actually a touchscreen and it works but is also rotated. I have not yet tried to fix it.

Sound

The es8336 sound chip is quite new and requires a linux kernel 6.1 or later, plus the sof-firmware package. The audio mutes when you try to seek in a stream, and you have to restart the stream to unmute it.

I use xbindkeys to get the volume and brightness keys to work. For reasons I don't yet understand you need to hold down Ctrl when using these keys.

% cat ~/.xbindkeysrc
"amixer -q -c 0 set DAC 4- unmute"
 control + XF86AudioLowerVolume

"amixer -q -c 0 set DAC 4+ unmute"
 control + XF86AudioRaiseVolume

"amixer -q -c 0 set DAC toggle"
 control + XF86AudioMute

"brightness +60"
 control + XF86MonBrightnessUp

"brightness -60"
 control + XF86MonBrightnessDown

Mouse buttons

The Trackpoint-like red nub works but requires considerable force. The mouse buttons under the space bar send 84 KP_Begin and 135 Menu rather than pointer events. These can be re-bound with xmodmap:

  xkbset exp =mousekeys
  xkbset m
  xmodmap \
    -e "keycode  84 = Pointer_Button1 Pointer_Button1 Pointer_Button1 Pointer_Button1" \
    -e "keycode 135 = Pointer_Button3 Pointer_Button3 Pointer_Button3 Pointer_Button3"

Note that XKB needs to be put into "mousekeys" mode for this to work. I use xkbset m for this.

Compose key

I normally bind Compose to Alt_R, but this laptop has no right alt key. I bind Alt_L to the "Windows" key and Compose to the left alt key.

xmodmap <<
remove Mod1 = Alt_L
remove Mod4 = Super_L
keysym Super_L = Alt_L
keysym Alt_L = Super_L
add Mod1 = Super_L
add Mod4 = Alt_L
keycode 64 = Multi_key

Other

On bootup hold down ESC to enter setup.

The power button is located where the delete key should be, and if you press it even for an instant it shuts down. I made a little cardboard tent to put over it.

The image on the screen sometimes jumps up 20 or so pixels then drops back down after a few seconds. Doesn't really hurt anything and I have not yet investigated.

The SD card slot works but sometimes times out and becomes very slow. Mounting the card read-only seems to help.

Jim Rees