[Arm-netbook] First impressions

[Adam Gill]

Jon Ervine wrote:
> 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.
I'll check the specs of this port and if there is a cable connector 
available - but we need to see first if this port is functional or not 
yet ...
> 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.
The JF 4750 Xburst 7" netbook I got from the other factory also SD card 
upside down!

> 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 
> <http://opensuse.org/> and also an armel image I've previously used on 
> Buffalo Linkstation's.
There is a update OS available soon  from the factory - as they are 
upgrading it for a US customer - as soon as it is avaialble  - you will 
be able to download it and see the structure ...
> 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.

YouTube and other online videos - I try to open youtube videos and the 
video has a "DEMO- only " image watermarked over the top left hand 
corner of the screen and cannot blow up the video to full size - I guess 
this was for the China market version or something? - I'll push for the 
updated OS as soon as the factory reopens ....   anyone else having the 
same problem?


>
> Jon
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
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