According to this, Elonex have got a new netbook launch planned in the near future targetted at female shoppers of M&S and Next.

The article refers to the ‘Elonex Websurfer’ – googling this turns up this at scan.co.uk, which appears to very similar to a One T.

It’ll be very interesting to see the new netbook – especially how similar the hardware and software of the Elonex One and One T is.  I’m also quite intruiged about the article’s refernce to remote access to home/work PC’s.

If anyone knows or hears more, please post a comment.

If anyone knows any more, please leave a comment.

Owing to the CPU chip used in these laptops, Linux distributions and software designed for the more ‘normal’ X86-based processors will not work, however, help is at hand…

In addition to the manufacturers websites, you might like to have a look at the following:

http://www.littlelinuxlaptop.com – This describes itself as the “ultimate unofficial free software and modding resource site” for these laptops. Have a look here if you are after more software, or want to get deeper into the Linux operating system. There is also a fair bit of other useful background information regarding the laptops on here, and useful links to other resources.

If you’ve just got the laptop out of the box, performing a software update using the inbuilt software updater is a good idea. This resolves a few glitches including some issues with the wireless function. It may be necessary to connect directly to your router using a cable to do this first time.

Other specific help you might be looking for:

Games: In addition to the games that can be directly installed to the laptop, users have found that you can play flash games (see this forum post), which opens up massive possibilites for widening the scope of use for these laptops, such as running flash presentations from other software like Openoffice.org. Alternatively, Firefox game add-ons can be installed (see this forum post), as the in-built browser ‘Bon-Echo’ is related to an older version of Firefox.

YouTube: Try this from the CnM site

The Small Linux Laptop Forum is an unofficial community forum for users of Elonex One / One T, CnM Minibook and other related mini laptops. Much useful information and problem-solving can be found here.

If you are trying to do something, have a search of the forum – quite often the problem you are encountering has been solved by someone else before. If you can’t find anything, submit a well structured post giving as much information as you can about the problem, including things you have tried already. They are a friendly and helpful bunch. Try and return the favour at some point by helping someone else – or if you work out the problem for yourself, post a ‘How-To’ within the relevant board.

I have a netgear wireless router, with SSID hidden, encryption WPA-PSK2 and wireless access station control on (ie limit access to router by MAC address of device).  I followed the following steps:

1. Connect One T to router using ethernet cable, allow auto-detection and then carry out system update (which included an update for the wireless software).
2. Using another computer that can connect to the router settings page, temporarily disable security settings on router so that SSID visibile, no encryption and no access control.
3. Using the wireless conection tool on the OneT, find and connect to the router.  Check connection has been made correctly (try out a page in Bon Echo).
4. Using another computer that can connect to the router settings page, find out the MAC address of the connected OneT.  This may have been where I went wrong last time – the MAC address on the back of the laptop was not the wireless MAC address.  Add the correct MAC address to the Trusted Wireless Stations list.
5. Disconnect the OneT from the router.
6. Restore the security settings of the router using the other computer.
7. Using the wireless conection tool on the OneT, find and connect to the router, entering the settings as required (this will include the network SSID if this is hidden – my One T+ showed the network in the wireless connection tool, but without a name, so I just entered this on the next dialogue box).
8. Connect to the network, then test out a page.
9. This worked first time around, but when I tried it later it would not connect until I set the SSID to visible on the router again – then it connected fine.  I’m unhappy about leaving the SSID visible, so I shall be manually altering this each time I connect the One T to the router (which is not likely to be often, so not really an issue to me).

Obviously, this will vary from system to system but it worked for me.  You also have to be comfortable with altering your router settings and the potential risk of leaving the security settings open for a period of time whilst you obtain the OneT’s wireless adapter MAC address.

The software in terms of educational and games packages is quite limited. Fortunately my son seems quite content in creating works of art in the ‘paint’ programme, and learning to write words on the keyboard in Abiword. Aside from this, there isn’t much on the standard install that he is interested in.

I have installed xgalaga and Rick Dangerous from the littlelinuxlaptop.com site. This site seems to get updated quite regularly and is a good resource. I’ve spent quite some time improving my xgalaga high score but just get splatted on Rick Dangerous.

In terms of robustness, I’m anticipating that this machine will have quite a hard life in the hands of my son, in fact, one of the motivators for doing this blog was a suggestion by some friends to document how the laptop fared! He has been very careful with the laptop and is quite chuffed to have been given it. However, disaster struck when we were on holiday a few weeks ago….the laptop had been carefully placed by him on the back seat of the car, but when I braked, it slid forward and fell to the floor. My wife retrieved it and gave it back to him, but I was curious as to why my son was asking “why had my laptop got a hole in it?”. When we stopped, I found that there was a dent in the side of the screen bezel and the plastic clip over the screen hinge had popped off (hence the ‘hole’). The boot process seemed painfully slow (a black screen for a long, long time!), but the laptop lives on apparently unaffected. I guess that’s the warranty out of the window!

I’ve bought him a generic mouse off ebay and a nice cheap 4gb SD card from play.com and he enjoys having stuff to plug into it.

It’s yet to be connected to the internet, so we’ll see how we get on with that later.

I’ve not got much time to administrate it, but please make best use of this forum. Many of the comments posted on the blog to date have been very helpful, and as people get to know their laptops sharing this knowledge will be very beneficial. I’ve no intention to replicate Elonex’s own resources, and it is obviously worth trying the official sites first.

As the forum software is not linked with the blogging software, you will need to register seperately. Sorry about this – I spent quite a while looking into bridging mods to allow unified login, but the reviews seemed to suggest that these were quite buggy.

I’ve also been looking at littlelinuxlaptop.com recently. This seems to be a promising resource for anyone wanting to get stuck in and add software. It would be nice to see GCompris or similar on the Fun & Games list in the near future.

I’m planning to continue this blog as a long-term test once it arrives. This laptop range has been firmly marketed towards kids, so we’ll see how it fares in the hands of a 4-year-old!

There have been quite a few comments added to the last post from people who have got their laptops, so please take a look at what they think to them.

With respect to comments, I’m not always able to check this blog every day and have also been away for a few days recently, so comments may have waited for a while to get moderated (apologies if this relates to you and please bear with me). I also got a couple of comments which contained direct email addresses which I couldn’t anonymise, so I’ve not posted these – hope this is OK.

thekanester has offered to post up an unwrapping video – thanks for this, look forward to seeing it!

As the post title suggests, please post up any reviews and comments here when your laptop arrives.

I’m hopeful that it will not be too much longer (robin2204 reports here that Elonex will be delivering his by the end of next week). I ordered mine back in April as a late, extra Birthday gift for my kids … today I was considering hanging on to it and making it a Christmas present.

Although ‘One’ deliveries have made it out, has anyone received a One t?