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...
Hello. I also have brick my notebook. I erased w-load. Do you have ideas on how to recover it.
ReplyDeletePS: Do you have a dump 4M spi flash? And what is model your spi flash memory? Thanks for any help.
I do indeed have a copy of the SPI flash. You can get it from here:
ReplyDeletehttp://shuntyard.com/WM8505/4Mb_spi_flash.zip
Hello, perhaps you can give me a light in that trouble. My EPS chinesse laptop with MW8505 as proccesor and NAND MLC Samsung CHip K9GAG08UDE Memory. In fact, I have a bricked device. I want to install android or linux and get a bricked device, trying to re-partitioning that memory.I read that you can flash and take it as it was at first. Can you give me some light? Thanks in advance.
ReplyDeletehiya, is any extra hardware required for any of the reflashing work? I have taken apart the netbook and i have the internal USB disk in my hand, now i am stuck where to go,i can put it back together again but what can i do to get the machine back to some sort of working order, i just get a black screen when powering up, and the power light turns off instantly when i push the power button, which doesnt seem normal to me, after trying to installing many different android and CE scripts one day it just gave this black screen and since then no script has worked, i even tried installing a linux installation with no luck... can you point me in the right direction, thanks!
ReplyDeleteHi
ReplyDeleteis any option for install debian on this device, if in my the sd card reader is broken?
Maybe if i buy sd card module for STM32 http://botland.com.pl/1507-4722-thickbox_default/modul-czytnika-kart-sd.jpg
what you tkink about this?