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I've been seriously looking into making one of the Raspberry Pi Laptops that have been floating around using the Motorola Atrix Lapdock solution found here and here.

The whole reason for doing this in the first place was because I don't really have a viable portable computing solution, so I was wondering if this would be a viable 'netbook'-esque computing unit. Mainly used for internet browsing, video watching, word processing, and text editing/coding, as well as a fun experience to use a RPi in.

Do you think this would work? I know that with some overclocking you can get pretty decent speeds on Wheezy, from what I've read online.

My plan is to use the raspberry pi on a Motorola Atrix lapdock with a 32 or 64 gig Extreme SD Card.

I just want to get a feel on whether or not I could use this as a 'netbook'-esque solution before going full on and buying all the components required.

Thanks for any and all replies.

Happy New Year!

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    The RPi laptop is a good idea in the "because I can" category, but you'd seriously be better off picking up a $200 netbook. After you buy the Pi, the LapDock, SD Card, and all the appropriate connectors and such, you will probably spend very close to $200, for something that has way less performance than a standard Netbook. – Kibbee Dec 28 '12 at 17:53
  • Be sure to wear one of those "Anonymous" vendetta masks if you take that thing to a coffee shop or on the bus ;D – goldilocks♦ Jan 30 '13 at 17:54
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I am using the Raspberry with Raspbian "Wheezy". Using the Midori browser (or any other) is rather slow and personally I would find it quite annoying for day to day use. As for videos, after one day of trying to make YouTube work I gave up. I have not overclocked it so that might help a bit though.

I recommend you not to use it for browsing and such if you're not a patient person.

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Update: A recently launched RPi powered laptop, found it on the Official Raspberry Pi MagPi site. Having said that, this question was posted before the RPi 3, which has made multitasking faster, this is really made browsers much faster.

It is viable. But I'd recommend getting a RPi first and using that as your machine for a few days, to decide if it would be viable for you. Although it isn't the fastest machine avaliable, the RPi isn't that bad. With the ondemand overclocking, web browsing has sped up quite a bit.

In terms of video playback, I have read of ways to get YouTube to work so it's not completely out of the question. Apparently it works quite well.

Also I've personally heard from a friend that he had to use his to do a report for varsity on and it really was not bad. But as I say try giving it a try before buying components to build a laptop.

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There is no objective answer to this sort of question I believe. In my opinion, even though RPI is a small board, with all the boxing around and wiring to it there is no way you can call it a mobile netbook-ish solution.

Besides, the performance thing. Unless you use lynx for your internet browsing, nano for text processing and avi2ascii for youtube, I don't think you are going to get the type of performance you would expect from a piece of modern technology. :)

A regular computer monitor and a atom insided mini-itx vesa-mounted computer would not be as mobile as the options you've mentioned but as well will not look like an apple duct taped to a notebook :)

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