[Arm-netbook] Initial observations

[Oliver Kiddle]

I'm suprised nobody has mentioned this but the midfun system is using dpkg. Unlike real Debian, version numbers on packages all have an r in them, e.g. 1.4-r4. There's many rather un-Debian things around like /libexec. It's using busybox. Only slight surprise in the package listing is that gdb is installed. gcc is not. apt-get is there and a sources.list pointing to http://repository.mid-linux.org/extras. Might be possible to use Debian etch/arm stuff, possibly with a rebuild and in worst case with a chroot (chroot is installed). Looking at repository.mid-linux.org, it seems that only the extras are there despite some quite promising, but broken, links.

dpkg --print-architecture outputs arm and not armel. I also notice that the features in /proc/cpuinfo includes vfp. Anyone know how that would work under armel as I thought armel was all about soft-float.

There's a lot of midfun specific packages and I think quite a lot of the UI code has been written by them - you can tell that by the amount of spelling mistakes. I actually quite like much of what they've done with the UI. I probably would have used icewm under Debian but may try to replicate some of what they've done.

A terminal emulator is installed, named /usr/bin/test_mid_term. You can create a shortcut to it by right-clicking on the desktop and selecting create launcher. It's not very good though - even basic ANSI sequences aren't working.

Interesting that the web browser is microb. I had assumed that was very maemo and hildon specific. Has anyone tried building fennec as we may need to get something more lightweight than firefox but more powerful than dillo? The Nokia tablet hackers at mer are using some tear browser which is webkit based. There's also midori and arora which use webkit.
The flash player is something called RichPlayer from www.sinodic.com. We're probably better off using gnash or hacking the flash out of maemo or android.

The X server is /usr/bin/Xfbdev :0.0 -nozap -br -pn -ac -screen x at 0x
I can't find too much documentation for this ((kdrive) server.
Any ideas how we might get the virtual terminals working. Seems the screen isn't cleared. Maybe the fonts are missing from the kernel. There's no console-tools or kbd package. On the tty, it only prints a cursor box for input characters - not for the output from commands.
Interesting but not suprising that they didn't include -nolisten tcp in the X  options.

flash memory appears somewhat differently to what I've seen before. /proc/mtd is empty and there's a /dev/mmcblk0 containing a standard partition table.

On my system, dmesg is full of messages like:
evbug.c: Event. Dev: usb-s3c24xx-1.1.4/input0, Type: 0, Code: 0, Value: 0
Is anyone else getting this?

Oliver