Clouds reflected from the sky, a SIM card, a Euro, a Presidential Dollar and a Texas State Quarter. More tomorrow...

R&B :)

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http://bbrv.blogspot.com

ok, i'm seriously impressed by the form factor. now i just need to apply some ninja information-retrieval skills to figure out what the GPU inside is, and you have another potential customer ; )

why is that power button on top of the back of the screen (or is not that it?) I usealy open a laptop and then turn it on. But maybe that what i seen on the image is not what i think that i see.

That is a desktop machine. This version has a VGA output and two USB ports.

Here is how the desktop looks in CloudCity running a Citrix client that permits Word (and other Microsoft Office products or other x86-only applications) to be be used on the ARM based device:



R&B :)

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http://bbrv.blogspot.com

Nice. Away with accessing citrix with a full blown windows pc. Nice for businesses. Save the environment, the electric bill, the initial purchase and on the maintenance.

That was the idea Marten. With video calling it makes for a neat little device. One we have the first big business customers with product we will shift development. The goal is to enable more software running natively with improved 2D/3D graphics, AROS, a more refined Linux kernel, etc. Then folks will be able to use the board to do many different things in many different places as the first EFIKA.

R&B :)

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http://bbrv.blogspot.com

@ BBRV

The $250 for the Open Client quoted from your web shop - is that for a complete package, with case, power supply, SSD and everything?

Is all the HW features supported by SW/drivers out of the box from the start, or is there some "vague-ish" to do list there?

It basically is the cased system - as seen on Bill's blog next to the various items - and power supply.

Bring Your Own Keyboard, Mouse and Display :)

800MHz CPU, 512MB RAM, HDMI and VGA, 4GB PATA flash, MicroSD slot, Standard SDHC slot, 2x USB 2.0, Ethernet, Wireless N, Bluetooth 2.1, audio, microphone sockets and a built-in speaker.

At request we can bundle a debug board so you can get serial terminal and JTAG. More likely than not, people will get these, and will have to request not to be sent them :)

Right now the software is distinctly in beta but it IS the standard Ubuntu Jaunty installation (minimal extra stuff added) which boots and lets you configure your language, keyboard, time zone and first user. Missing right now are the multimedia codecs, an accelerated graphics driver, any form of Flash plugin.. these are coming later. It also runs the RedBoot firmware instead of Aura; quality control and a significant amount of pride are at stake here :)

These will all be provided in due time. The hardware is basically done. We don't want you to wait for the software. The system is usable, and bootable from any Linux filesystem you care to install with the provided kernel (debug board required to get the full benefit of this). There is even a rescue disk and we can provide full help and high-level documentation to anyone who wishes to get started.

The first few things I'm looking forward to seeing is someone making this board into a mini wireless router. The wireless card should support HostAP mode, with ethernet connected to the ADSL/cable modem and wireless for the rest of the family.. plus storage (whack a 32GB SD card in there!) and wireless keyboard and mouse.. you can get a lot done.

Power cable is US-only but if you already have an Efika, it's the same "C5" (Cloverleaf) power cable that plugs into the new brick.

The full system is cheaper than the Efika launched at, and also cheaper than the original Open Client.

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Matt Sealey

OK, thanks for the info. I guess it's aiming more at "power Linux users" at the moment than general Joe Consumer.
Well, if this is required in order to fiddle with your own OS installations, then I think I would like one! :-)
How far away do you think this will be?
But one will be able to flash Aura into it later, yes? If I have understood things correctly, then Aura will provide a HAL alike interface to all the the i.mx515 controllers for the OS, thus making sure *all* OS's (even smaller ones, like AROS) can use *all* accelerated features of the chip/board, without NDA negotiations etc with big companies that doesn't even notice you're waiving your hand to get attention?
Speaking of US/Europe power standards, is the device aware of us using 240V here? ;-)

It is not only important to get things moving with the "power Linux users" but also on the commercial side too:



The virtual desktop represents an enormous market opportunity. The sheer size of the current spending on desktops (both hardware and support costs) is estimated to be close to $500 billion annually. As one of, if not the, single largest line items in most IT budgets we believe the desktop virtualized also represents the largest potential for cost savings. We are going to attack this opportunity on both fronts through the new Open Client (lower cost desktop) and cloudcity.me with the Citrix client, Google Apps and a few more useful features. The EfikaMX Open Client is as ready as it needs to be to get moving in this direction...

R&B :)

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http://bbrv.blogspot.com

I hate to read these lines: Are you refering to accelerated graphics driver inside x or is not it there at all yet?

Is it going to be as easy to boot another kernel as with the original efika? As that was very easy :-)

There are lots of ways to boot a new kernel - xmodem/ymodem serial transfer, JTAG, changing the MicroSD card out..

It is not as easy as with the current Efika 5200B *as it stands currently* but it will be before long.

Multimedia, accelerated graphics is a licensing issue. We have the code for it but shipping an MPEG2/MPEG4 decoder software requires reporting to the MPEG-LA plus there are other issues of where we want to PUT this code (some may be in Firmware, some userspace, some kernel).

Until we clean everything up you will be stuck with the kernel we provided, unfortunately. It is not possible to build a mainline kernel for the board without potentially burning it due to power regulator setup.

We are working hard to provide the source code and this will probably happen at exactly the same time we provide the Aura firmware update (systems come with RedBoot for now, but it works) which will move these hardware dependencies out of Linux.

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Matt Sealey

So if I place my order today, when will I have the product?

(I.e. you have it on sale now, but are you delivering now as well, or are you taking pre-orders?)

I'll reply to myself here, since I after I made the above post spotted the following:

"will ship within 3 weeks of ordering due to an order backlog."

Anywhere between usual ship date and 3 weeks from now depending on how many people order it before you.

It's first come first served and if we get a 200-unit order in between the last person, and you, then we will fulfill that order. We have to bring the systems out from Taiwan and do quality control and installation on them, this takes a little time...

The note on the site is just a warning; you might pay now, and get it tomorrow, or you might end up waiting a little longer before it even gets out the door. Choose the cheapest shipping method, and if we're feeling nice we might Express it to you when we have stock.

We're anticipating some demand, so. It's just so we don't disappoint people with a product on the store today, and then have people order while they are still shipping from Taiwan to us, and it takes us a couple days to work through the current orders.

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Matt Sealey