dushaw
12-13-2002, 12:36 PM
My Malaysian netbook arrived the other day I thought y'all would be interested to hear my story...bear in mind that I am NO expert.
I won the e-bay auction and received the automated response from ched@cyberway.com.sg. After waiting a week and hearing nothing, I bugged them about it and was told it was on its way (i.e. "the check is in the mail" - they popped it in UPS express delivery in response to my e-mail, looks like) It arrived from Singapore in 2 days.
As described by others, the package was basically a UPS bag with all of the bits dumped into it with little regard to packing. The netbooks are meant to be rugged, however. It came with an unlabeled CD-ROM with a copy of the psion software on it, a 64 MB compactflash disk with the infamous OS.img, and a powersupply with an astonishing collection of transformers and adapters to convert Malaysian power/outlets to US power/outlets. The various power adapters did not connect too well, so I ended up having to tape the whole 5lb arrangement tightly together to keep it from shorting. I have a line on a 15V, 2A Toshiba notebook power adapter (PA2438U) on e-bay that should work fine, although I may have to rewire the netbook's 15V plug. The backup lithium cell CR2032 had expired.
I had to verify that the latest os.img did not work, and it did not. I tried truncating the new os.img to be the number of lines of the old os.img, on the theory that perhaps the boot loader is looking for only X MB of OS. I tried copying the first 20 lines of the old OS over the first 20 lines of the new OS - all to no avail. The OS version I have is Version 1.05(281) (Release 158).
The netbook has 32 MB of RAM, of which 14MB becomes ROM for the OS and the remaining 18 MB becomes available to the user for new software, etc. My theory is that these DIMM's have a small bootloader hardwired on to them. I wonder if one replaced the original DIMM with the 32MB expansion DIMM that one might upgrade the bootloader as well - on the theory that all these DIMMs have the small bootloader on them for production efficiency?
I found that my DELL 1150 TrueMobile wireless networking pcmcia card (lucent/hermes) worked without a problem. Ethernet seems quite slow, however. I also have the Psion IR 56K travel modem, and this worked without any problems either (that I've noticed). I read somewhere that the Dacom gold LAN eithernet cards have a smc91c9x chip on them, so as an experiment I got a SMC etherez pc card from e-bay (a $12.50 experiment) - this did NOT work, though it looks like it tried. Apparently LAN cards draw considerable power, so perhaps the netbook cannot provide this card with quite enough power. Does anyone know of a cheap clone of the Dacom ethernet cards that would work?
I installed an alpha version of mindterm from http://www.psionteklogix.com/pm/AuthFiles/login.asp - this is an java-based ssh terminal to allow secure connections over ethernet. You have to register and login to get it, but it is free. This was an old version, however (1.2?), and I found a new java version from http://www.appgate.com/mindterm/ (version 2.3.1) that supports ssh/scp/sftp, ssh2, and compression. This is free. I got this to work with the alpha version of mindterm by: 1) placing the MINDTERM.JAR file in c:\system\java\ext (where you will find the v. 1.2 *.jar file - which you can delete) and 2) changing c:\system\apps\mt\mt.txt to have the single line "com.mindbright.application.MindTerm -cp MINDTERM.jar". VERY nice! Platform independence - who'd a thunk it?
To modify mt.txt I installed the EPOC text editor from http://www.symbian.com/developer/downloads/archive.html There are some other very useful bits of software there as well - I've just noticed javasweep, which I now know I need...
It is easy to change the wallpaper to get rid of the One-Ed wallpaper (menu, preferences)
I have not tried to install linux on the netbook yet (www.psilinux.org) - this is
still problematic for the netbook (but fabulous for the 5MX, if I do say so myself :) ), but I'll give it a go before too long. I fail to see how the OS.img problem has anything to do with the linux installation - linux does not use the psion's bootloader, of course.
I tried to get the VGA adapter from colorgraphic, but it looks like the pc card version is no longer available. The compactflash version is not supported by EPOC, alas - which it ought to be!
I think that's all. In short I'm happy, in spite of the nuances of the Malaysian netbooks. (I never expect a warranty from anything I get on e-bay....)
The trial version of Opera 5 did seem to work faster than the original Opera. I may have to buy some software afterall...I'll wait to see how the OS.img issue shakes out.
Cheers,
B.D.
I won the e-bay auction and received the automated response from ched@cyberway.com.sg. After waiting a week and hearing nothing, I bugged them about it and was told it was on its way (i.e. "the check is in the mail" - they popped it in UPS express delivery in response to my e-mail, looks like) It arrived from Singapore in 2 days.
As described by others, the package was basically a UPS bag with all of the bits dumped into it with little regard to packing. The netbooks are meant to be rugged, however. It came with an unlabeled CD-ROM with a copy of the psion software on it, a 64 MB compactflash disk with the infamous OS.img, and a powersupply with an astonishing collection of transformers and adapters to convert Malaysian power/outlets to US power/outlets. The various power adapters did not connect too well, so I ended up having to tape the whole 5lb arrangement tightly together to keep it from shorting. I have a line on a 15V, 2A Toshiba notebook power adapter (PA2438U) on e-bay that should work fine, although I may have to rewire the netbook's 15V plug. The backup lithium cell CR2032 had expired.
I had to verify that the latest os.img did not work, and it did not. I tried truncating the new os.img to be the number of lines of the old os.img, on the theory that perhaps the boot loader is looking for only X MB of OS. I tried copying the first 20 lines of the old OS over the first 20 lines of the new OS - all to no avail. The OS version I have is Version 1.05(281) (Release 158).
The netbook has 32 MB of RAM, of which 14MB becomes ROM for the OS and the remaining 18 MB becomes available to the user for new software, etc. My theory is that these DIMM's have a small bootloader hardwired on to them. I wonder if one replaced the original DIMM with the 32MB expansion DIMM that one might upgrade the bootloader as well - on the theory that all these DIMMs have the small bootloader on them for production efficiency?
I found that my DELL 1150 TrueMobile wireless networking pcmcia card (lucent/hermes) worked without a problem. Ethernet seems quite slow, however. I also have the Psion IR 56K travel modem, and this worked without any problems either (that I've noticed). I read somewhere that the Dacom gold LAN eithernet cards have a smc91c9x chip on them, so as an experiment I got a SMC etherez pc card from e-bay (a $12.50 experiment) - this did NOT work, though it looks like it tried. Apparently LAN cards draw considerable power, so perhaps the netbook cannot provide this card with quite enough power. Does anyone know of a cheap clone of the Dacom ethernet cards that would work?
I installed an alpha version of mindterm from http://www.psionteklogix.com/pm/AuthFiles/login.asp - this is an java-based ssh terminal to allow secure connections over ethernet. You have to register and login to get it, but it is free. This was an old version, however (1.2?), and I found a new java version from http://www.appgate.com/mindterm/ (version 2.3.1) that supports ssh/scp/sftp, ssh2, and compression. This is free. I got this to work with the alpha version of mindterm by: 1) placing the MINDTERM.JAR file in c:\system\java\ext (where you will find the v. 1.2 *.jar file - which you can delete) and 2) changing c:\system\apps\mt\mt.txt to have the single line "com.mindbright.application.MindTerm -cp MINDTERM.jar". VERY nice! Platform independence - who'd a thunk it?
To modify mt.txt I installed the EPOC text editor from http://www.symbian.com/developer/downloads/archive.html There are some other very useful bits of software there as well - I've just noticed javasweep, which I now know I need...
It is easy to change the wallpaper to get rid of the One-Ed wallpaper (menu, preferences)
I have not tried to install linux on the netbook yet (www.psilinux.org) - this is
still problematic for the netbook (but fabulous for the 5MX, if I do say so myself :) ), but I'll give it a go before too long. I fail to see how the OS.img problem has anything to do with the linux installation - linux does not use the psion's bootloader, of course.
I tried to get the VGA adapter from colorgraphic, but it looks like the pc card version is no longer available. The compactflash version is not supported by EPOC, alas - which it ought to be!
I think that's all. In short I'm happy, in spite of the nuances of the Malaysian netbooks. (I never expect a warranty from anything I get on e-bay....)
The trial version of Opera 5 did seem to work faster than the original Opera. I may have to buy some software afterall...I'll wait to see how the OS.img issue shakes out.
Cheers,
B.D.