Hello everybody!

It's been a bit silent here last few years, but just today e-mailed Bill from Genesi about some spare parts for my Efika MX Smartbook and he seemed to be a bit surprised, that anyone is still using the device these days. Well I am and I'd decided to post here my story.

In the beginning I wanted the original PowerPC-based Efika board, because I've been and still am Power/PowerPC fan, but I never managed to get one. When Genesi inevitably shifted from PowerPC to ARM, I didn't hesitate for a long time and bought the Efika MX Smartbook in October 2011. I had some bad luck and after several days the poor little machine broke to pieces without obvious reason - you can find the thread somewhere on this forum - Genesi replaced the unit under warranty and out journey started.

I was using the smartbook almost daily from 2012 to 2017 during my daily commuting (that's about 40 minutes twice a day), during holidays, mostly for typing (blog, etc.) and PHP/Perl scripting and created on it some things still in use today. In 2018 I didn't have much use for it, but this year I again put it back in daily use.

It may be slower than average modern smartwatch, but it still works and I wouldn't do anything I do on Efika MX faster if I did it on faster machine. After long six years I upgraded from the Debian Squeeze to Jessie from Konstantinos Margaritis, I just removed the default desktop and replaced it with super-fast tiling window manager dwm, updated the packages and the machine is perfectly usable again.



After few week however some problems prevailed - I had to replace the keyboard, because the old one after more than sever years the bottom metal layer separated from the rest of keyboard and it moved during typing, which was quite annoying. During the changing of keyboard (I have two spare since 2011) one of the four plastic keys, that are holding it in the smartbook body stopped to do it's job and hold the keyboard in the place. The plastics probably deteriorated during the time and the key doesn't have quite the original shape. Otherwise the Efika is still as good as new and I just wanted to know whether Genesi still has some spare parts - If I could replace the top part of shell with palmrest and touchpad a stick the keyboard back in the place, I could use Efika MX another 8 years (or at least until the battery dies).

Is there anyone else still using it the way I am?

I still find it useful too. I don't use it everyday, but it is great if you want to ssh/mosh/vnc/xpra into your pc from the sofa. I also compiled latest emacs to browse the web by eww, and do the home accounting with ledger in ledger-mode. It's loaded with jessie and a kernel found on github I think. But I belive I'll still use it after LTS is over on june 2020.



Mine's start button broke so now I have to start it making contact with a swiss knife tweezers and also had to attach somehow a two color led to replace the pieces inside the broken start button.

TodayI tried to power-on my SmartBook after a month.
Last time i used it, it worked flawlessly; now it won't boot at all.
The little padlock on the left of the keyboard, blinks four times
with a blank screen.
Someone could help with this?
Thank you

..will try to dd another SD card. I thought the caps led blinking had some
meaning in the boot process.
Maybe an HW failure..