A few days ago I recieved my [Ben Nanonote]. As I mentioned in an [earlier posting] The Ben Nanonote is my first bit of fully free, copyleft hardware. Now that I have had it for a few days I wanted to share my experirnces with the world.
The first thing I'd like to make clear is that although the Nanonote is a great device its not for the non-technical user. If you have never worked on anything other then Windows or you have never used or heard of the command line, then the Nanonote is probably not the best unit for you. If you have a techie friend or spouse who can get it set up and configured for you, and you really want to support [copyleft] hardware then feel free to buy two (your techie friend or spouse will want one for themselves).
Ok, now that that is out of the way, onto the review.
When I first set eyes on my Ben Nanonote my reaction was "Oh! Its so cute!". Now, this is not my usual reaction to tech, but the Ben definitely is "cute". It is sleek, black with silver accents, and tiny. The closed unit fits easily into the palm of my hand. Even when open the Ben can be easily cradled in one hand.
Being the impatient type, and excited about my newest bit of kit. I popped the battery in and fired it right up (knowing full well that I'd not have much time wihout charging the battery first.). The Ben fired right up and in a flurry of text and splash screens I was dropped into the gmenu2x screen. Power on to fully usable is fast. One of the fastest boots I've seen in a long time. Android and iDevices aren't even close. (remember we are talking fully off to ready to go, not sleep or suspend to ready).
That feeling of speedyness has not left. I haven't found a single program the feels or runs sluggishly. even the slowest loading game has only a minor delay.
There seemed to be fewer programs then there should be but that was fixed by "flashing" the unit to the lastest version of the software. (more on this in a bit).
The next thing I did was to plug the Nanonote into the usb port of the netbook that acts as my server. It needed to cahrge and this would also give me a chance to check out the "Ethernet over USB" functionality of the device.
My [Trisquel] based server found the Nanonote no problem and after one quick command it and my Nanonote were happily talking to each other. Once the unit had charged for a while I decided to "flash" it to the latest firmware. This required a little prep but only a little. [Qi-Hardware] now have a wonderful [flashing script] that does most of the dirty work for you. I downloaded that and the [xburst-tools] it would require. After installing the usbboot utility all that was needed was to boot the Nanonote into usbboot mode (by shorting two contacts on the bottom of the unit with the provided rubber button) and then running the reflashing script as root. The script downloaded all the latest firmware (boot loader, kernel, and rootfs) and flashed them to the unit. The flashing process took a little longer the I expected but went without a hitch. I rebooted and was pleased to see that I now have may programs waiting to be explored.
My new bit of kit was now charged and ready to rock. I began exploring the various apps and was impressed by the selection and a little surprised to see that many of the apps were Internet related (the bare bones Ben dosen't have wireless access... more on this in a bit too.). I started checking out various apps and played some of the games.
One of the things I was anxious to test was the sound as thus far my Nanonote had not made a single peep. I borrowed my wifes microSD card and launched the music player app. It didnt see any of her mp3s. I tried a few other things but it soon became clear that the Nanonote only supported free and unencumbered media formats. Not as bother for me really as all my music is in OGG format. The only frustration that this caused is that I had to find another way to test the sound. I quickly found a game on the Nanonote that used sound and was surpirsed by how loud it was even with the speakers set to only 50%. The built in squeaker speaker did a fine job.
Since there were several programs that needed the net to function I decided my next move should be to get the Nanonote talking to the Net. Doing so was [well documented] and achieved with four simple commands. As I was doing this on me server machine that rarely sees a reboot the changes will be persistant until the next boot. The documentation even includes udev rules to make the Nanonote both connected and be shared to the internet (something to look into later).
Once on the net things like nanomap worked like a charm. The browsers on the Nanonote are fairly basic, fine for me and others like me but again the average user would frown.
Inspired by the ease of the connection I decided to try hooking the Ben to the Net through my Nokia N800. Sadly, the N800's limited USB Host mode seems to prevent this although I may take anotheer stab at it another day.
I was however able to hook the Ben to the Net through my OLPC XO-1. My XO-1 is running a Debian Squeeze system based on [DebXO 0.6] (more on that in another post.). The hook up was just as trivial on the XO and This means I'll be writing a script for my XO so I can jack my Nanonote into wireless anywhere as long as I bring my XO too. Which is usually the case as it is my main traveling laptop.
So, now I had a good feel for the Nanonote and wanted to start making it useful to me on a daily basis. The first thing I did was to follow [the instructions] on how to [set up a data partition]. I moved some of my music onto the data partition with "scp". The media player app found and played them no problems.
Next I scp'd my .abook folder over to /root on the Nanonote. this gave me instant access to all my contacts (I already use abook and was pleased to see it on the Nanonote.). Next I exported my calendar from GPE Calendar on the N800 and after importing them to calcurse I had access to my appointments too. Calcurse had a minor problem with how GPE had formatted the timezone info so I had to adjust things by three hours. Even with that minor snag the import saved me from re-entering a lot of data.
So now I'm ready to start being productive with my Ben Nanonote. In fact this entire posting was composed on the Nanonote. Which brings me to the keyboard. When I first saw the keyboard on the Nanonote I was a little concerned about what it would be like to type on. I must say that despite it's compact nature and multitude of shift keys that it is well layed out, easy to learn and just the right size for thumb typing. The keyboard even has many of the keys one need often while on the command line easily accessible.
It's early going yet, but so far I am very impressed with the Ben Nanonote. There is still much I need to check out and many hours of hacking to be done. So I will definitely be posting more on the subject in the future... Stay tuned!
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