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UMPCs - Ultra Mobile PCs are coming to our life. They are going to replace PDA and Notebooks in some cases. So, it’d be nice to to know all refinements before starting to buy UMPC. The big and great The Carrypad UMPC Buyers Guide can help potential owners of UMPC to find appropriate model. The author talks about OS choices, disk size, form-factors, screen size and battery life. At the end of the guide the author gives an example of ideal UMPC

• 5-7″ 800×640 Touch Screen

• Detachable Mini Keyboard

• Wifi, BT2.0, SD slot, USB2.0

• 600mhz advanced processor. (powerful enough to run good quality mpeg-4 video)

• 3 hour battery

• Min 10GB storage

• Reduced OS

• Price: $600

I’ll need to buy some UMPC (Origami) in the nearest future to use it as Plutohome Orbiter. So, I’ll follow this guide.

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Daewoo has launched a new UMPC - the Lucoms Solo M1. The specifications are standard UMPC:  low voltage 900MHz Intel Celeron processor, 7-inch touchscreen, 512MB of RAM, Bluetooth, WiFi, Windows XP Tablet Edition OS. Additionally, the UMPC includes the S-Video out on its useful looking docking cradle (enables use as a PVR), a 1.3Mp camera (enables use as a videophone), SD card reader (good for photographers) and a DMB TV receiver (good for selling the device with a TV contract where coverage exists.)

The price of the Lucoms Solo M1 is about US$1000 in Korea.

[via The Carrypad UMPC journal]

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Company Samsung decided to use AMD processor instead of Intel’s Celeron M 353. It’ll allow to reduce Q1 price from US$1300 to US$700. That’s good news isn’t it?

[via Reg Hardware]

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Recently Nokia has released an excellent device - Internet Tablet 770. It’s based on Debian Linux and it seems attractive for open source developers (see a bunch of already created applications). My interest for Nokia 770 conditions on possibility to use it as Plutohome Orbiter - graphical console to controle Smarthome system. It’s compact, has touch-screen and supports SDL - Simple DirectMedia Layer which is used to build a graphical user interface for Orbiter.
To start programming for Nokia 770 you have to setup development environment included Scratchbox cross-compilation toolkit, Maemo SDK rootstrap and X server (Xephyr or Xnest). The process of installation those software is described clearly here but there is a simlier way to do it. You need to download an installer and it does all work for you: downloads tarballs, installs and configures them. you need to just answer to a couple questions, prepare a cup of coffee and read your favourite news
I’ve already tried both ways. I’d like to say that the sacond is the best!

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I tried to install Maemo SDK. It needs to have scratchbox. It can be installed from sources or using RPMs. I downloaded and uncompressed sources as it was described in the Maemo manual.
When I run
/scratchbox/run_me_first.sh
after uncompressing the tar-balls I got error:

Inconsistency detected by ld.so: rtld.c: 1192: dl_main: Assertion `(void *) ph->p_vaddr == _rtld_local._dl_sysinfo_dso' failed!

The real solution to fix that is set vdso in 0. It can be done at least two ways:

1. run command echo 0 > /proc/sys/kernel/vdso
2. add to the grub menu:
   kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.11-1.1369_FC4 ro root=/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 rhgb quiet vdso=0

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