Due to current demands on my time the project isnt coming along as fast as i hoped. This is as well as the difficulty i have found in sourcing a compact keyboard to use the board with seeing as the original (keyboard) has failed.

Apart from that, I have heard of the EWB challenge which as part of a complete solution involves providing cheap computing to an indian orphanage. When I was informed about it i thought the EFIKA would be the perfect platform on which to run because it is small, compact and uses a fraction of the power of a laptop which is many times more expensive. And with the EFIKA2 coming round the corner, it will be a one stop shop for a compact system that provides the features needed.

Over the previous weeks I have been pruning down a feature list for the first release.

These should be:
A basic (mainly due to my time constraints) and simple to use interface for those who have never interacted with a computer before (i should be uploading mock ups of the interface in a few days).

A facility to create alert style messages that would match the type found in the final design.
These would include a message type and a short recording (max 2min). Ideally these would either be uploaded to a central post which an aid worker would man or transmitted to adjacent communities/nodes.

I have yet to decide on the underlying system that would support the code but the main requirement would be that it can be loaded onto a small flash card and be used as a static image.

As to the graphics card, I am using a radeon 9250 but given the pain of removing the card whenever i need to access the hard drive manually a on-board solution would be awesome and the system would be slimmed down dramatically.

Cheers.
And sorry for the lack of updating.