Hercules Ecafe Software
I happened to stumble upon an interesting offer for the Hercules eCafe EX(163 EUR including shipping fees), and I couldn't resist and bought one. (I haveto admit that I did hesitate with 'ordinary' netbooks which offer more decentperformance for only 40 EUR more, but I was tempted by the exoticism of an ARMarchitecture.)Looking back at this, the most important point about themachine is: a strange glitch means that a few keypresses are lost every 30seconds or so. This doesn't sound like much, but it's enough to make typing onthe device very annoying, which means I've never used it seriously for anything;it's really a pity, because the device could conceivably be useful for a lot ofthings otherwise (though the impossibility of running a Web browser is a bitlimiting, and the fact that you're stuck with a fork of the kernel at a specificversion, and to certain binary variants of software to get hardware videoacceleration, is a problem for sustainability).
I've tried out several ways toinvestigate the problem, including recompiling the kernel with additional debug,disabling all USB power saving options, etc.; nothing shows up in dmesg wheneverthe keypresses start getting ignored. A possibility would be to replace thebuilt-in keyboard with an USB one, but this would not be trivial. I'm a bit outof ideas with this machine, really.The eCafe looks more or less like an ordinary netbook on the outside (thoughthe design is a bit weird), but it pretty different inside because it uses anARM processor (and a flash chip for storage). This means no mechanical parts atall (and no ventilation, no heat vents even) and ridiculously high battery life(roughly over 12 hours, though I should really benchmark it) but ridiculouslybad performance.The documentation available about the device online is sparse and therearen't that many people using it, so I thought I'd post some random notes aboutit in case someone wants to know more about the beast. I'm still discovering thething, so there are many questions here and not many answers, but here yougo. Non-removable battery There is no way to remove or change the battery. There is, however, a switchto physically disconnect the battery from the device if you don't want to useit.
SIM port There is a port to plug a SIM card. I have no idea what it's supposed to beused for, or if it's connected to anything. SD-card reader Yes, the thing really has two sd-card readers: one external on the rightside, and one internal reachable from under the device. DIP switch The device is advertised as having a 'DIP switch' to boot a differentoperating system. You can find more info about that in this.What the switch does is instruct the computer to search for an U-Bootinstallation at a specific position on an SD-card in the external reader. BIOS The device has no proper BIOS, it uses U-Boot. I'm not exactly sure how goodthis is: the boot is not especially fast, and the U-Boot part seems to take sometime (though it's hard to tell because of all the nice annoying splash screenswhich hide what is really going on).
From the PDF mentioned above, it seems asif U-Boot is requesting a DHCP lease to do a TFTP boot, which might take a lotof time, but this is just a guess. I'd have to try with my own U-Bootsetup.
ACPI The device has no real ACPI support but seems to use custom stuff instead.The battery status can be queried through/sys/devices/platform/imx-i2c.0/i2c-0/0-000b/powersupply/BAT0/ Suspend The device has pretty good suspend to RAM with pm-suspend.Resume really takes 4 seconds, as advertised. The stability of this isunclear. Light sensor The device seems to have a light sensor. I don't know yet how you can queryit.
Backlight The backlight brightness can be controlled via/sys/devices/platform/pwm-backlight.0/backlight/pwm-backlight.0/,all the way from full power to no LCD backlighting. Special keys There are a few special keys, which all generate X events. On the keyboard:XF86Sleep, XF86MonBrightnessUp,XF86MonBrightnessDown, XF86AudioMute,XF86AudioLowerVolume, XF86AudioRaiseVolume, andkeycode 248. On the right side with LED effects:XF68AudioPrev, XF86AudioNext,XF86AudioPlay, XF86AudioStop. It's nice that you canremap those to whatever you want, especially the four on the right side that canbe reached even when the lid is closed.
I still have to find a creative use forthis. Numlock and Capslock leds Yes, there are some, which is pretty rare nowadays. Keyboard feel The keyboard feel is slightly hard but pretty nice. However, there is areally annoying glitch: some keypresses seem to be lost occasionally. I stillhave to debug this.
It occurs both in ttys and when using X, so either it's thekernel or it's a hardware problem. Wifi chip It is driven with the non-standard rt3070 module. It seemsrelated to similar models with good kernel support, but I'm not really sure. Itseems pretty limited: for instance, changing the MAC address( SIOCSIFHWADDR) is not supported. Once again, hopefully there's away to make this work.
Kernel limitations The provided kernel isn't compiled with much stuff. For instance,LUKS, iodine and openvpn don't work. Performance Performance is horrendously bad. /proc/cpuinfo says theprocessor is an 'ARMv7 Processor rev 5 (v7l)'. Using Firefox on a reasonablysimple HTML page is already pretty unpleasant. However, it's a nice ssh client(or text-entry station), except for the keyboard glitch. Shipped OS The shipped OS is a customized Ubuntu with a crappy netbook interface andcustom repositories from Hercules without much stuff inside.
The interface isprobably simple enough to be used by anyone (except that it's so slow.) but it'not really good for a power user. It is possible to add the Ubuntu NetbookRemix Lucid Lynx repos and install the applications you want, though installingtheir kernel will not work. Multimedia acceleration Hardware acceleration for multimedia decoding is available though aproprietary modified version of gstreamer.
It really makes adifference, ie. You can read a video with these extensions but not without. I'mnot sure yet about how versatile this can be. Toolchain There is though I didn't try to play with ityet. I did; you can rebuild the bootloader and kernel (itisn't entirely straightforward), but you're stuck with the provided kernelversion, which includes some changes that would apparently not be trivial toport to a newer kernel. Available memory The machine is supposed to have 512 MB of RAM, but/proc/meminfo only reports 416680 kB MemTotal.
Maybe this memory isreserved for something (video acceleration?), or maybe the kernel doesn't detectit correctly? Or maybe the hardware just doesn't match the spec?
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Hercules Ecafe Software Reviews
VirtualDJ®. Serato®. Traktor®. DJay Pro®. MixVibes Cross®Hi DJ Melmark,This screenshot is not a capture of VirtualDJ but of another software, Hercules Ultra Mobile DJ Mix, included in Hercules mini-PC eCafe. Hercules Ultra Mobile DJ Mix is not designed by Atomix Productions (it operated under Linux while there is no VirtualDJ version compatible with Linux), so this skin cannot be adjusted for VirtualDJ.Do you look for this skin because you like its look or because you look for a skin fitting on a mini-PC display (1024x600 resolution)? If you look for a 1024x600 resolution, what is the model of mini-PC you want to use?More on Hercules DJ Mix Room:DJ MelMark5MessagesPosted on 05/07/09 at 17:37:28.