On Thu, Feb 4, 2010 at 3:09 PM, Hector Oron <hector.o...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hi ! > > 2010/2/4 Alejandro Mery <am...@geeks.cl>: >> been "engineering samples"... what about the UART, serial port (even 2 >> pins help a lot) and jtag reachability? =) > > That's an important part. :-) > Let me explain our experience. A bunch of Debian Developers met at > Taipei (.tw) and we got a netbook (MIPS based) under $100. After we > got it, we had *no shell*, *no root*, *no loader access*, *no > serial*,... > > We had to exploit a vulnerability in the pdf reader order to start > telnetd and we were lucky to get a remote shell. After making some > pressure to the company to release source code because they were > violating GPL, they putted up some source packages, but not kernel > (linux), nor bootloader (uboot).
ouch! *sigh* yes, a chinese MIPS cpu, whilst wonderfully cheap, reverse-engineering - i've done it: i have 9 HTC Linux phones and one ETEN G500+ to prove it - is a complete pain. i'm not doing it again :) so, this time we play a different game: use the fact that of the 20 people wanting machines _fifteen_ of them are software engineers who will happily help this factory to improve its value for the world market by getting debian packages on it, right? :) > This device has really nice price, but its openness really sucks. Be > aware on what you buy, always make sure it really supports open > source. that's why adam's going along with his phone, laptop and a webcam and skype. we can definitely see from the photo that it has a swirly "G" and from that we're guessing it's "gOS", converted to chinese. > The laptop I am talking about is http://www.g-netbook.com/GL-740I.html > I would not recommend to anyone to buy it. okaaay, thaat's what the Ingenic CPUs are, i wondered what those numbers were. 4720 etc. ok, they're MIPS processors. yes. USB 1.1. SDRAM. 366mhz CPU. wouldn't touch it. or, more specifically: i'm looking in a different kind of price-range and a different kind of feature-set. between adam and i we must have looked at over 300 systems over the past few months. > In the case of ARM netbooks, I have been reading on the 'Always > innovating Touchbook' based on the beagleboard (OMAP3) > http://www.alwaysinnovating.com/home/index.htm yes! very nice machine, i know the hardware designer - really quiet guy. the touchbook is more expensive so as to give them a good safety margin. and the OMAP3530 CPU on its own is $35 even in 1k volumes! add $20 for 256mb POP memory and you start to see why the price is $USD 299. i've spent absolutely damn months looking for systems like this and they are juust starting to crawl out the woodwork. l. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-arm-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
