I spotted another of these machines on eBay, it was labelled as a VT8500 and apparently had a broken keyboard. It was £20 shipped so I took a chance on it.
Take a peek at it on my Flickr, booting Debian.
Upon getting it out of the box and hooking it up to the mains, I was inclined to agree with the seller's claims. Then I opened it and noticed that there wasn't a VT8500 chip on the board; there was a WM8505 staring back at me, complete with 2GB of NAND flash.
This was interesting, thought I, so I grabbed a WinCE recovery image, booted it up and noticed that the keyboard worked... but it wouldn't install.
Long story short, a flash for the "Sylvania Smartbook" correctly re-loaded WinCE onto the netbook, and moments later I had installed Android instead.
After deciding that Android, whilst it's probably brilliant on a tablet, really isn't suited to a netbook like this, so I've gone and ordered one of these SDHC cards. Make sure you get Class 10 or faster (I've linked to Class 10 there) as they're about the same price and make quite a bit of difference in speed!
When it arrives I'll be starting a full write up of how to get these things set up with linux. Perhaps even without another computer being involved. We'll see!
I've begun a NAND-free writeup which I'll release soon, it's almost complete, and as soon as I can flash my SPI chip then I'll finish that off too. If I don't get around to doing that any time soon, I might release it anyway, for someone else to finish, perhaps?
So far I've been completely unable to get the Debian installer running on either of my netbooks, but there's honestly very little point of installing it to the 2GB flash when you can run everything from an 8GB Class 10 (way faster) SDHC card...
