Playing with Intel Classmate PC
This evening, all of a sudden Intel folks turned up at work. After a bit of discussion on various things like what we were doing and the Intel vision of things, I was offered to test out a Intel Classmate PC which was announced in Brazil last year. The Celeron-M 900 MHz based unit was small and light, with a label “Engineering Sample” stuck above the 7″ screen, and Windows XP Pro loaded. Hence this was the 2GB solid state drive variety, with 256 MB of main memory out of which 8 MB was shared for the on-board 915 video.
Of course, one of my first attempts was to see if it would boot using Ubuntu LiveUSB. Apparently one needs to press F11 during the POST to bring up the boot-device selection list. Otherwise, its Windows, even disabling the HDD didn’t quite cut it. So far, the system boots, but there is no X11 and hence no gdm login screen. Quietly drops me to a BusyBox shell with a nice warning.
Tomorrow I shall try to see if I can install Ubuntu on it.