UPDATE 20th November 2012: Due to recent changes in the Arch Linux boot process, this tutorial is no longer valid. You can still download an old pre-built image and install it, as I explained. But with this old image, updating the distro (with pacman -Syu) will most likely throw some errors and maybe even break the system. Also installing applications without updating the distro (with pacman -S application_name) will likely fail because of the not updated dependencies. If you have searched the net for a very cheap tablet, maybe you have seen a lot of 7' chinese ones featuring the WM8650 SoC. This SoC has an ARM9 CPU running at 800 MHz, a DSP, a 2D graphics accelerator and a lot of peripherals.

This download is an incremental release to Windows Embedded CE 6.0 R2. If you do not have Windows Embedded CE 6.0 R2, you can also download an evaluation copy from the Microsoft Download Center. Windows Embedded CE 6.0 R3 provides innovative technologies that help device manufacturers.

I don't like tablets at all, but I found some cheap chinese netbooks containing pretty much the same hardware, removing the touchscreen and replacing it with a keyboard + touchpad. I couldn't resist and bought one of these netbooks in Aliexpress.

It costed me around 50€, shipping costs included. The specs of this machine are: • Wondermedia WM8650 SoC at 800 MHz. • 256 MiB DDR RAM (I think it runs @ 800 MHz, but I'm not sure). • 2 GB internal NAND Flash. • 7' 800x480 pixels TFT screen. • 3 USB Host ports. • 1 Ethernet port.

• Headphones and microphone ports. • Internal 7,4V 1800mAh LiPo battery. • 9V 1,5A power adapter. • Android 2.2. • We are ready for the first boot.

Unmount the SD card, insert it in the netbook and power it on. You should see the Android robot, and then the messages Loading Kernel. And Starting Linux. Should appear. In a few seconds, you should be able to see the boot messages, and finally get the login prompt.

The first boot will take a lot of time because udev has some problems and eats almost all the CPU. We will fix these proplems in the next step. Default password for the root user is root. • Udev needs the accept4() OS call, that is not supplied by the Android kernel I have built. To fix this, you have to install libaccept4. Download and put it inside the SD card (for example in /root).

Then start Linux, login as root and in the console change to the directory containing the downloaded package and type. Accept the installation of the library, and reboot. Udev should be working fine from now on, and boot time will be a lot shorter. • To extend battery life, power to the internal WiFi dongle is off by default. To enable it, you need to toggle the GPIO pin controlling its power. Download, copy it to the SD and install it with the following command: pacman -U wmt-gpio-1.0-1-arm.pkg.tar. Saab Wis 2010 Isoo more. xz Upon installing this package, to enable the WiFi chip, you have to input the command: gpio 1:6:d8110040:d8110080:d81100c0 And to disable the WiFi chip: gpio 0:6:d8110040:d8110080:d81100c0 You can create two scripts with these commands, or if you always use WiFi, you can add the first one to /etc/rc.local, to enable WiFi each time the system boots. • To read the battery charge level, use the following command.

Echo 200 >/sys/class/power_supply/wmt-battery/capacity You can also add this line to rc.local to set the screen brightness to your favorite level each time the system boots. Now you have a fully functional base Arch Linux install.

It's highly recommended to update your system ( pacman -Syu). Then you can start installing your favorite utilities, window manager, etc., by following the instructions documented in. I'll give you some hints for Arch Linux newbies. Skip them all if you are experienced with this distro. You can start by editing /etc/rc.conf. This file contains some basic configuration parameters, like for example the timezone (TIMEZONE), the hostname (HOSTNAME) and some basic network configuration parameters (that default to DHCP on the Ethernet port). Very important in this file is the last line, detailing the services started when the system boots, and the order in which they are started.

I usually remove netfs from the list, replace network with networkmanager (you'll have to install it first) and add dbus (you'll need it for the window manager and some more programs). If you use networkmanager instead of network daemon, make sure you put it after dbus. • Allow all the users in the wheel group to use sudo. Run the visudo command, and uncomment (remove the '#') the following line: #%wheel ALL=(ALL) ALL If you don't know how to use the vi editor, press the [I] key to [I]nsert text, when you finish, press [ESC] to enter command mode and write:wq to write the file and quit the editor. If you mess something up, just press [ESC] to switch to command mode, and write:!q to quit without saving changes. Then try again the visudo command.