Mini Open Source Linux Pc On Ebay


Um, is there supposed to be a complete lack of a URL and no information whatsoever in your post? :p
 
I hope you're addressing wrath of khan and not those of us who were left hanging when we went to the effort of reading his thread. ;)

I'm pretty sure the Ben NanoNote came up here a while ago. Let me try to find the thread...

EDIT: Not quite the one I had in mind, but it is one. :p There was an older one which I'm having trouble locating, wherein the general consensus was that the Zipit Z2, once hacked in order to install Debian, was a better deal.
 
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Prometheus said:
I hope you're addressing wrath of khan and not those of us who were left hanging when we went to the effort of reading his thread. ;)

I'm pretty sure the Ben NanoNote came up here a while ago. Let me try to find the thread...
Click to expand...
yep its the ben nanonote.i fixed the link in my earlier post :)
 
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Prometheus said:
I hope you're addressing wrath of khan and not those of us who were left hanging when we went to the effort of reading his thread.
wink.gif


I'm pretty sure the Ben NanoNote came up here a while ago. Let me try to find the thread...
Click to expand...


oh... um... whatever.

anyway, there is hardly any information about what type of linux it has or the processor or anything like that. or is there? i dont know.
 
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@wrath of khan - Thanks muchly - that makes for much easier reading. :)

I do wish I could find that thread about it, though... Again, though, I'm pretty sure it was agreed that the Zipit Z2 offered more for the money.
 
VRAndy said:
What a silly looking keyboard.
Click to expand...

Yes, I think its silly, too. In fact, I hate it. I'd rather carry around my Game Gear. Actually, I'd rather carry around a Game Gear that a DS or almost anything else (except for a pandora that is)


I saw this crappy netbook thing at Zellers the other week... It was made my Fidelity, a cellphone company, i think. It SUCKS. look it up, cant remember the model number. it has very negative reviews. it has linux, but it hides that fact, and doesnt give you access to the shell, or so I read.

Oh yeah, its a fidelity VPC (very personal computer).

The 1.5lb netbook features wifi, onboard USB and ethernet ports, an SD reader, a 7″ TFT display with a 800×480 resolution, 2GB of internal storage, and what looks like to be a 100mhz processor. It’s obviously running linux with preloaded programs...
Click to expand...

If i bought that, it would be $200 down the toilet.

I bought a VPC on impulse a couple days ago, in a retail store. I was able to browse the net via WiFi within about 5 minutes, mostly delayed by my wireless router paranoid security setup. The machine is okay for text, but rather slow for browsing anything graphical. Battery life with WiFi enabled is poor, less than 1.5 hours. The underlying Linux OS is hidden from the user. After I downloaded and installed the software update 1.1, the WiFi stopped connecting, unless I disable my router's security. So this is a first-generation product, with typical problems. It is definitely small and lightweight, and the screen is very nice (but 800×480 so horizontal scrolling is sometimes necessary). I have not been able to get any video working yet. Volume for MP3 playback is way too loud, especially with earbuds. My VPC seems to have 4GB flash memory, partitioned as two virtual drives C and D, and has about 3.5GB available to the user. There is no clear indication of the RAM size. There are hints that the CPU is the MIPS architecture. This is appealing because many virii designed for x86 architecture will not run on the VPC. My early opinion is that the VPC is okay for tolerant techie tinkerers, but is likely to be frustrating for non-techies or people accustomed to blazing fast PC's with big screens. The USB ports might be v1.x because transferring data to/from a USB memory stick is very slow (about 0.5 megabytes per second). I have not mapped out all the rough spots yet. But the machine has promise.
Click to expand...
 
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There is some active Nanonote development on these boards and Dingoonity. It's got pretty much the same internals as the Dingoo (Slaanesh included Nanonote features in his Dingoo DOSBox port - pretty cool with that little keyboard). It's not supposed to be a powerful UMPC or anything, just a little hacker device.
 
The Ben Nanonote is actually very cool. I have one.
It's pretty much compatible with the Dingoo A320 as it uses a near identical chipset.
The keyboard is better than what you think. In fact compared to the Pandora keyboard, the layout is in my opinion better - well for the keys that I use anyway.
I find that some commonly used keys on the Pandora need a two keys to get to (like ESC and TAB) though the Pandora does have dedicated numerics.
The quality of keyboard is also very good with a nice feel to it.

I paid AUD$80 which was an utter bargain and I used it more than any console at the moment just due to it's sheer tiny size.

I recently ported DOSBOX to that Nanonote and it runs DOS games very nicely indeed.

So I don't see why you hate it and it certainly is not "junk" compared to the Pandora. If you have no need for wireless capability and want on the go DOSBOX - it's amazingly good.

All up the Pandora is technically better in every regard (with great controls - especially the nubs) and I love it to bits, but a bit big for my pocket, where as the Nanonote is about the size of a medium mobile phone so can easily fit in a pocket quite comfortably.
 
slaanesh said:
The Ben Nanonote is actually very cool. I have one.
It's pretty much compatible with the Dingoo A320 as it uses a near identical chipset.
The keyboard is better than what you think. In fact compared to the Pandora keyboard, the layout is in my opinion better - well for the keys that I use anyway.
I find that some commonly used keys on the Pandora need a two keys to get to (like ESC and TAB) though the Pandora does have dedicated numerics.
The quality of keyboard is also very good with a nice feel to it.

I paid AUD$80 which was an utter bargain and I used it more than any console at the moment just due to it's sheer tiny size.

I recently ported DOSBOX to that Nanonote and it runs DOS games very nicely indeed.

So I don't see why you hate it and it certainly is not "junk" compared to the Pandora. If you have no need for wireless capability and want on the go DOSBOX - it's amazingly good.

All up the Pandora is technically better in every regard (with great controls - especially the nubs) and I love it to bits, but a bit big for my pocket, where as the Nanonote is about the size of a medium mobile phone so can easily fit in a pocket quite comfortably.
Click to expand...

lol i probably judged too quickly... actually, I might get my brother one of these (with his money, lol.)
 
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Slaanesh, thanks for your review of sorts. :) I've been interested in it, somewhat failing to see the point when compared to a smartphone however. It might be a good stopgap device and cells are a bit dodgy anyways with all the closed source around. Now if I only had an extra 100€ lying around..

I presume it also has frotz on it? If so, cool :) Also the dosbox, 360mhz gives enough power for a 286 I think? Hmm, plenty of good games even in that period.

EDIT: I dared to go in to the dingoo section and I found the dosbox thread which answered everything: dosbox yes to frotz, yes to 286+ power, should be a lowend 386(sx) if syndicate runs on it. I think I'll spend the afternoon getting acquinted with all the stuff the dingoo community has done on the nanonote. :) NN with the Wiz might be the best combo of easily available linux handhelds. Both do different things, MAME is great on the wiz and looks like my favourite genre of strategy games works nicely on the NN. And there's so much to choose from, since they've been making first class strategies from the early eighties.
 
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