The $99 microlaptop, now available...

[Mel Wilson]

Lennart Sorensen wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 16, 2010 at 10:06:24PM -0400, D. Hugh Redelmeier wrote:
>> Quite a bit more.  But it was more expensive (although you can find
>> them for ~C$200 sometimes) and not open.
>>
>> This Ben thing isn't powerful enough to interest me.  32M of RAM and a
>> 320x240 screen, and no networking make it too limited.
> 
> That's what I was thinking too.

The price reminds me of the TS-7400 boards we were playing with. 
These ran a Debian release with the manufacturer's own Linux kernel, 
and could do their own compiles (though it's possible we were using 
64MB SRAM on the boards that did this.)  IP issues around the SD flash 
interface meant that you couldn't actually install and boot those 
kernels, but the raw capacity was there.

No networking would be a showstopper for me, though it looks like one 
might connect a network adapter via USB.

Finally, my picture of something that small and limited is a tablet 
configuration for robustness and simplicity.  The screen+hinge seems 
like a very bad idea on this scale.

I guess a lot of MIPS stuff will be coming out of China.  Time to 
practice up on PIC32.

	Mel.

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