[Arm-netbook] First impressions

[Jon Ervine]

Originally sent to the other mail address:

I've had my armel netbook for a few days, though not had as much time to get
to grips with it as I would have liked. Here are some of my observations and
impressions so far:

1. Battery life appears to be very good
2. The 'mini-HDMI' port is *not* a mini HDMI port that I've seen before.
Seems the port on the netbook is slightly smaller than the port on my HDMI
to mini-HDMI cable.
3. I've unscrewed all the screws and haven't as yet been able to prise the
case apart. I don't want to put too much force through it, and it seems
there is some kind of join roughly at the  USB ports on one side and the SD
card slot on the other side.
4. The SD card slot takes SD cards upside down. Kinda odd.
5. The OS can mount SD cards formatted as vfat but not ext2/3 which is
strange.
6. I've tried booting from the SD card by holding down the power button and
left and right sides of the mouse button. My SD images must not be good. I
used an openSUSE ARM image from opensuse.org and also an armel image I've
previously used on Buffalo Linkstation's.
7. Getting terminal access is proving difficult - the  installed OS is
heavily locked down.
8. You can use the web browser to browse the filesystem. It boots,
unsurprisingly, to runlevel 5, and we're using a user account called midfun.
Both root and midfun user accounts are defined in the /etc/passwd file with
their passwords there. By my reckoning that should *in theory* make the
passwords crackable?
9. I can launch geditor from the taskbar and have it edit files that are
otherwise difficult to access on the filesystem - however, the midfun user
doesn't have much in the way of access rights so this isn't much use yet.
10. Pressing Ctrl+Alt+F1 does activate tty1, however the output is simply
black cursor 'boxes' over the GUI. From /etc/inittab only tty1 is loaded
during boot, and resetting the console doesn't help to make it visibly
useful. From here, returning to the GUI via Alt+F7 works with no problems.

Jon
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