I got my Efika MX smartbook in the mail yesterday and so far I'm pretty impressed. I'm still putting the system through its paces so I will likely have more to say in the future.

Here's my thoughts so far.

the good:
* Amazing keyboard very easy to type on for such a small machine.

* great battery life (i expect the power management software will get better and improve it even further, still I would love to get that six cell battery when it is available since that should give this thing insane batery life even without any power management)

* flash seems to work decently (one of the first things i tried)

the bad:
* my #1 problem is the track pad since the mouse buttons are microswitches under the track pad corners this makes dragging impossible. I've only been able to do drags by double tapping the track pad just right which is awkward to say the least. other mouse operations are great and the mouse is otherwise very responsive. but as soon as i have to drag anything its a major PITA. I'm likely to get a small mouse for portables to use with this thing.

Suggestion: do what other smartbook vendors do and put buttons to the left and right of the track pad I know I could use that setup a lot better than the current setup. (perhaps for the MX53 revision?) Also I only found out about the double tap to drag by accident you might want to revise the book that comes with the smartbook to fill the user in on the trackpad use a bit more.

* The X video extension is not currently working and the software that currently ships is not compliled against OpenGL-ES or arm with hardware floating point. (I think SDL can be compiled to use ES, this would likely make mplayer work a lot better even without Xv)

I'm sure this will get fixed over the next few months. I'm curious to see how it runs with gentoo but haven't had a chance to prepare an SD card for it yet.

* no advanced firmware I would like to see Aura running on the smartbook eventually. it would be nice to have an open firmware implementation that can do things like netboot and
boot from USB. it seems that this was the plan originally but I wasn't able to find any details about why we still have uboot. I did see a post about bringing up Aura on the MX but not much after that.

* suspend works, hibernate does not Also the power LED just stays solid on when in suspend giving no indication that state has changed. (I assume this is being worked on and like the acceleration stuff above I kind of expect that at this stage)

* so far I have not been able to record video from the webcam
I suspect this is because of driver issues that are still being worked out with the encoder/decoder and the X accel.
The camera itself works but so far no software ive tried is able to keep up well enough to record both audio and video.
(except for guvcview and only with a low camera res and using both uncompressed video/audio and even then its iffy on whether or not audio will be garbled at some point in the video produced.)

* the built in mic doesn't seem to be sensitive enough even when set at 100% voice recording is faint at a normal speaking volume.

wishlist items for future revisions:
* external video connector for smartbook
* pixel qi screen and no glossy screen cover. option
* built in ethernet
* touch screen

(these next items are probably way too silly and not on your agenda but what the hell)
* I would like to see an industrialized rugged weatherproof version. It would make a great replacement for my ancient Itronix GoBook IX250. it doesn't need to be perfect but
I'm thinking a much more rugged case and some additional protection from the elements would made a pretty cool setup.

One of the reasons for mentioning the rugged option is I think this system would be a great alternative to the One Laptop Per Child XO laptops. It is a lot cheaper, has better battery life and can easily run the same software environment (Sugar). and Genesi is a lot less screwed up than laptop.org when it comes to how they do business. (check out olpcnews.com to see what I'm talking about)

* a 9 pin serial port would be cool (but really i will likely just use a dongle any good suggestions for USB to serial adapters good enough to use with a real green screen terminal like the IBM 3151 would be most welcome)

I hope this feedback will be useful I plan to write a lot more about the Efika MX smartbook once I've had more time with it.

Hi, thanks for your feedback.

It is possible to install the 2D version of the netbook remix onto the Efika MX by installing the correct packages. It might be handy to add that to the out of box install. I've found it rather helpful so far.

you basically have to install ubuntu-netbook-efl-default-settings, netbook-launcher-efl and several applets it complains about not finding once you log in. you also will want to install the maximus package or else it wont auto-maximize and remove window decorations.


Another modification I've done is add fuse to /etc/modules
so that I can use things like sshfs without having to do a modprobe every time I boot.

* note for people using sshfs make sure the directory you mount sshfs ontop of is taken out of the file indexer settings or you will be in for major slow down when the indexer kicks in.