New project: EasyPC E700 mini-laptop

Using marktplaats.nl, in Holland a well known local alternative for eBay, I bought this cheap 7" mini-laptop.



Not really a good bargain because I payed €75 for it while in the US they are sold for $80 or even less.
Anyways, it was not 2nd hand, it came with the original foil. And an American mains plug. Took me some time to discover that a converter was included in the box. ;)

On it is windows CE 6 installed. Nice, but quite useless so far. It works quite fast, but the Windows Mobile Center doesn't recognize anything when connected using an USB-cable.
The Internet Explorer on it is so very slow (taking 2 minutes for a pageload) that it's unusable.

Anyways, I bought it to get some experience with Linux on an embedded device. The laptop has 256MB of EEPROM memory for the OS and 64MB RAM. Even for Linux not enough.
EEPROM means basically that you only can change the contents of that kind of memory by erasing the entire memory and putting an entire image back. If you ever did an BIOS upgrade on your computer this will be familiar.
But the nice thing is that it can load an OS FROM an SD-card, without touching the Windows CE installation. And that's the way to try running Linux. Later, much later, if Linux is running fine I can write this to the EEPROM memory.

First I had to figure out what kind of hardware there was on the mainboard. Windows CE reports a WM8505 but that's not true. a hidden program in the Windows folder (setserial) showed the VT8500. To be sure I had to open up the casing and disassemble the device to have a look at the mainboard. Putting it back later on turned out to be difficult, especially getting the keyboard-ribbon back. But since there must be a way to assemble this in an easy way in the factory, we finally figured out that it was much easier when the keyboard was popped out of the casing. Then I would close the casing and put the ribbon in the connector from the upside.




Now that I was sure that I had a VT8500 I used the kernel made by NextVolume. Here's the forum about this kernel/linuxversion. This is a kernel which uses so called blobs, which means that the kernel is partly build with source code and partly with binary blocks from the Windows drivers.
This means that no one really knows what the binary blocks actually do.
In contrary there's also an attempt to make a fully opensource kernel for this machine.
You will find a very interesting thread on the Ubuntu forums here.

Now that I (my laptop) have survived the disassembly and reassembling I might be looking forward to the next challenge: soldering a serial connector to the mainboard: Since this Linux version only give me a black screen I need a remote terminal to have a look at errormessages. Unfortunately the only remote connection this laptop seems to understand, even in Windows CE, is using a non-existing serial port.