Originally sent to the other mail address:<br><br>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:<br><br>1. Battery life appears to be very good<br>
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.<br>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.<br>
4. The SD card slot takes SD cards upside down. Kinda odd.<br>5. The OS can mount SD cards formatted as vfat but not ext2/3 which is strange.<br>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 <a href="http://opensuse.org/" target="_blank">opensuse.org</a> and also an armel image I've previously used on Buffalo Linkstation's.<br>
7. Getting terminal access is proving difficult - the installed OS is heavily locked down.<br>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?<br>
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.<br>
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.<br><font color="#888888">
<br>Jon</font><br>