[Linux-7110-psion] A comment on e-bay netbooks....

[Brian D. <du...@ap...>]

I seem to have won an auction on e-bay for one of the several
netbooks that came up.  Several interesting bits of information
may prove useful to psilinuxers interested in getting one of
these:

1) The present auctions seem to be ending in a price range of
   about US$500+/-50.  Early on, some of these went for under
   US$300.

2) Apparently the seller has a lot of 2000 of these (purchased
by lot on ebay for $1 each?? a rumour) - so we are likely to see 
a continual stream of these over the next years??  And ever decreasing
prices?

3) CAUTION!  These netbooks are apparently an educational version
intended for a Malaysian school system project.  They apparently
have all the hardware they are supposed to, but the ROM chip is
different, and you cannot upgrade the EPOC OS (but the existing
OS is fairly uptodate).
See the various e-mail threads at:
http://www.pdastreet.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?s=&forumid=38
Psion seems rather upset by the whole thing, and perhaps rightly
so.

4) I wonder if it would be possible to use ARLO to load in a new
EPOC OS?  We use it to load a linux kernel, why not an EPOC kernel?
There must be some kludge one could do to get the a new OS to load...

It may be a while before I start messing around with psilinux on
the netbook, however... :)

B.D.