SmartQ V7 (part 1.) – first steps

I chose an ARM based MID to experiment with. This guy is able to play Full-HD videos with low power consumption. The SmartQ V7 I bought is far from the build quality of IPad but far cheaper and has lot more connectors by default. Three operating systems can be chosen during the device boot. All of them is set to Chinese so it takes some time to change language. Actually WinCE has to be upgraded in order to switch language. With Linux it is pretty easy and it takes some time to set on Android.

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Hawkboard (Part 1.) – first steps

With all my experiences with IGEP and SheevaPlug I was ready for a new experience with an ARM board having a SATA connector. My desktop environment at home is totally ARM based. First I tried SheevaPlug being my desktop but I was not completely satisfied because of the instability of the USB based display. Then I tried IGEP which has proper display handling but when it does I/O on USB or SDHC it largely blocks the system. Finally I set up SheevaPlug to be my NFS server and I use IGEP from NFS root. I compiled a Gentoo system on the IGEP and this became a pretty usable system with acceptable performance. The story was almost done, but there was one point I couldn’t digest: the NFS perfromance. I connected a USB disk to SheevaPlug and it sees around 16MB/s. When it is exported to IGEP through NFS it goes down to 4MB/s. There are also issues with the USB disks power saving. These are the factors that made me curious about the Hawkboard .

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