(tl;dr at bottom)
Primarily, this is running on the J1425 processor on resource-hungry Win11, so it’s gonna be an old, slow dog with the initial updates and after that, still don’t expect a lot of speed. This sucker also got HOT HOT HOT running all the updates and I think it started to thermally throttle when it was updating because it took a couple hours to get the whole OS updated. It never shut off though so I’m guessing the throttling is to keep that from happening with this newer edition. The unit cooled down pretty quickly after going back to idling. The touch screen can be pretty finicky as I’m just using the default display size.
This unit still uses the 12v USB-C connector for power. Be sure to mark your power adapter so you don’t accidently fry any of your other dumb USC-C devices.
A lot of people are interested in installing linux on the metal/dual-booting, and I’m personally adverse to that. It appears with lack of driver support, some distros have it good (Ubuntu) while others seem to be suffering (Debian.) Virtual boxes seem to be the go-to from the looks of it.
I had to manually install the Microsoft 2019C++ Redistributable 32bit package before I could get VirtualBox running, but I just threw the GUI Kali 32bit (x64) iso in it and it works, shockingly enough! Before you can get things running, you need an external keyboard since you can’t interact with the CLI/GUI without one first, the touchscreen doesn’t pull up the keyboard. After the installation, I found out that the Wifi is fine out of the box, the default display ratio sucks, and the CLI is a PitA to work with and sluggish since the J1425 is an oldie now.
I had to modify a fair amount of the settings to make this functional as a portable Kali machine. My settings are:
DISPLAY:
-800×600 4:3 resolution 1.3x scale
This helps keep the Kali display stay in the entire window. The native display default (1200×800) is too much and requires scrolling through the entire display to see everything. A major nuisance. The 800×600 also allows the virtual keyboard to stay within the display too since if you dock the virtual keyboard to the bottom of the screen, you won’t see it in the default 1200×800 displaying, and if you dock the keyboard to the top, it’ll cover your CLI. My pic has the best setup I’ve found so far
ONBOARD SETTINGS (keyboard):
-General tab:
— ✅ Auto-show when editing text
-Window tab:
— ✅ Dock to screen edge (bottom)
-Layout tab:
–Small
These are the baseline settings I applied for the virtual keyboard. It’s been working well as can be seen in the attached photos.
ravs.b trojan (virus)
This is an oldschool hash from 2011 that changes a few registries, the winlogon and the Windows File Protection (WFP). Trojans use this to obfuscate any changes to critical windows files by changing the SFDisable flag to “2” so Windows won’t pick it up.
Now, I’m *guessing* that this is a false positive because people do go into these registries and change the SFCDisable so custom drivers can be loaded up for whatever lower kernel access people want or need. The Gole1 Pro has the flag set to “4” and uses a custom driver to have the keyboard automatically pop up which is why you see the “Core isolation” as off in Windows Defender (see pic.) If you turn this on, the keyboard no longer pops up because the popup is now disabled. It’s janky code to get a custom driver working for the Gole1 Pro, but I can see why that is the case. This is also why you won’t see the keyboard popup in a virtualbox/dualboot environment.
HIGOLE:
Guys, if you can make your pocket PC with the option to have a loaded Ubuntu/Kali/Debian operating system, these things will sell like hotcakes. Please consider this since you did look at all of the suggestions for the older GOLE1 Pro and fixed them 🙏
Final thoughts/tl;dr:
It’s a neat object but it’s not a powerhouse. Linux is spotty but you can make it work. I doubt this will last a long time but I have zero complaints for a pocket Kali Linux running ~250 USD with the coupon.
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