CVS Netbook Revisited

by on Jul.25, 2011, under Embedded devices, Hardware, How-To's, Linux, Software

A few months ago, I posted a hardware teardown of the CVS Sylvania Netbook pictured above. After working with it and performing a lot of research on it, I promised a follow up article, and here it is.  To sum it all up, with a bit of modification to the software, a spare SD card and a lot of patience, you can actually turn this thing into a somewhat useful Linux device.  There’s also some improvements and suggestions to be had for improving the Windows CE side of things should you decide to continue using it in its default state.

When I posted the original teardown, I was somewhat distressed at how little information there was for this device. There was a ton of “marketing” material online however very few real-world posts.  This appears to have changed and although most of the reviews lamblasted the device as a horrible design and underpowered, I have found that for the price I paid for it, it’s not bad at all.  In this article, we will be focusing on software because as much as I’d like to say I’ve done a lot of hardware mods to this thing, the truth of the matter is that I haven’t.  Time has continued to get away from me and I’ve had to put a lot of projects on hold.  But let’s not start this article off on a downbeat.

In the three months that I’ve been doing research on the Sylvania Netbook, I have uncovered a lot of information that can help turn this machine into a pretty useful piece of equipment.  The fact that it has a pretty decent battery in of itself should be of merit to justify the time invested in fine-tuning it.

1: Windows CE

In my research, there have been two key complaints against the Sylvania netbook in regards to a “stock” configuration.  The first complaint has been that it is running Windows CE (affectionately called “WinCE”) and the second being that the WinCE installation is really badly implemented.

  • The key thing to remember with working with Windows CE is that Windows CE is NOT Windows like on your desktop or “normal” laptop! Windows CE was designed for small form factor devices and although it shares the same name as it’s bigger brother desktop OS, Windows CE can not run Native Windows applications. This appears to be the biggest hurdle in locating user software for the device as people will attempt to download software then when they get the software into the netbook, they are thrown off by an error message stating it’s not a “valid” application.  Consider it like taking a MacOS program designed for MacOS and attempting to get it running in Windows XP.  It ain’t gonna happen.  That being said, there is Windows CE applications out there, however the pickings are slim.
  • The other issue with working with the stock Windows CE installation is that the OS software is so badly implemented on the netbook that most things that should work, don’t.  Thankfully for us there is a patch available that will make things easier.  From research, the patch addresses several performance issues with the core OS, several updates to the builtin applications as well as an update to Internet Explorer.  Unfortunately, IE will still render mobile sites by default, but the rendering won’t take as long.  The patch also fixes the issue with the wireless card not being able to properly associate with WPA/WPA2 secured networks and DHCP release/DHCP renew works as expected.  I have uploaded the patch to here.  In order to install the patch, follow the below instructions. You will need a spare SD card at least 128MB in size.

Here’s how to download and perform the OS update:

  1. Download the patch from here:  sylvania_laptop_OS_update.zip
  2. Extract the executable to an SD card.
  3. Insert the SD card into the Sylvania netbook.
  4. Browse to the SD card slot (Computer -> SD Card)
  5. Launch the patch and follow the on screen prompts.

2:On the Linux side of things…

When I did my original research, I was fortunate to have come by a site dedicated to a Linux distribution made solely for the WM8505 series devices like the Sylvania Netbook. The site and the distribution were called Bento Linux and much like the Japanese namesake, the distribution was very small and was designed to be able to run within the computer’s limited spec.  Unfortunately, the site www.bento-linux.org no longer exists but thankfully I still have the documentation and files needed to pull it off.  If you are the owner of bento-linux.org and are willing to give me the site files, I would be more than happy to host it here. Please contact me in the comments.

One of the added benefits of Bento-Linux is that unlike some replacement OS installations, this is a sidecar installation meaning that all work is done on the SD card.  If you want to boot to Windows CE, halt the Linux OS, pop out the SD card and power the Netbook back on and you’re up and running like nothing happened.  Although the Bento Linux site did have instructions for performing an installation to the device’s flash ram, it is not recommended as if you accidentally mess up the Linux distribution, there may be no recovery. In a sidecar installation, you can pop the SD card into another device, make your changes, and then put the SD card into the netbook and you’re up and running again.

Although the site claimed that the distro could run on a 512MB SD card, I will up the recommendation to at least a 2GB card.  Prices are low and SD cards are very commonplace so it’s worth it to get a larger chip.  I started out on a 2GB SD card, but later upgraded to a 4GB Microdrive and noticed a significant performance increase going from solid-state memory to a USB Microdrive. Your mileage will vary, but it is recommended to stick with an SD card first, then perform upgrades and additional installations as needed later on.  As far as USB devices are concerned, you can use any USB storage device/keydrive that is recognized by the usb mass-storage driver in Linux.

Please note that the version of Bento I was running is usable however it did not appear that the sound card was operational. Since I am intending to use this as an external serial console, this was not a deal breaker for me.

Installation (SD Card Only)

Bento-linux comes in two parts. One part is for a FAT16 partition placed at the beginning of the SD card and it contains the boot commands needed to tell u-boot (the Netbook’s bootloader) how to boot the linux kernel and the root filesystem.  The other part contains the linux kernel and the filesystem in an EXT3 filesystem and will contain all the files needed to run Linux.

  1. You will need to start with an SD card at least 1GB in size.  I used a 2GB which gave me some room to play around on and of course the bigger, the better.
  2. Partition the SD card with a 20MB FAT16 partition at the beginning of the card and the rest of the disk space can be allocated for an EXT3 partition.  Do not create a swap partition.
  3. Download the file fatpart.tgz and extract it into the root of the FAT partition on the SD card.
  4. Download the file extpart.tgz and extract it into the root of the EXT3 partition of the SD card.
  5. Unmount the card and insert into the Sylvania’s SD cardslot and power on the machine. It should boot the Bento Linux distribution

Installation (SD Card + USB stick)

This setup does not require special partitioning, however it does require that the SD card be formatted FAT16.   You will also need a USB storage device formatted EXT3.

  1. Download the file fatpartusb.tgz and extract it to the root of the FAT formatted SD card.
  2. Download the file extpart.tgz and extract it to the root of the EXT3 formatted USB stick (or hard drive).
  3. Insert the SD card into the Sylvania’s SD slot and insert the USB stick into a free USB port on the Sylvania.

In either instance, when you first boot the distro, it will simply bring you to a console prompt and you are good to go.  There are a couple of things you may want to do:

  • (Pretty much required)  Set a root password.
  • Install fluxbox (light weight graphical interface) and wicd for wireless control.
  • Install aurora (lightweight firefox lookalike)
  • Install other applications though apt-get as desired.

Although the bento-linux site is no longer in existence, it appears that all the repositories that come with the distribution point to the arm ports of the official Debian repositories.  Prior to them going offline, I saw a note about Bento-Linux had the sources for the WM8505 however it appears that VIA has recently released the sources for the WM8585/VT8505 chips that drive the netbook so if you have any custom drivers, it appears that now there is an easier method for getting the drivers compiled in.  I am not a kernel compiler expert so I can’t advise on this process, however some brief research does seem to indicate that there is some element of truth to this.

Linux Impressions and final words

After getting the Bento Linux distribution working comfortably in the netbook, I played around with it and made some tweaks here and there that did give some notable boost in performance.   If you are using a spinning platter form of storage, creation of a  swap file or swap partition is recommended as it will give you a performance boost.  Attempting to make a swap file on the SD card or on a solid-state USB drive are not recommended because of the performance hit when writing to these devices and also due to the issue of “burn-in” when a storage cell is written to frequently.  I found that the device works decently enough for quick tasks and light webpages however it will not handle flash at all, nor will it be able to render sites with large amounts of images.  In my testing, I was able to use this device to configure Cisco switches and other devices through a USB-Serial adapter and Linux’s “minicom” terminal emulator.

While I believe it was a valiant effort by Sylvania to enter into the netbook market, I do believe that they should have done more research.  The Sylvania netbook, even running Linux and with all the performance tweaks mentioned, still is easily beat by Asus’ first offerings into the Netbook market. The two biggest things that seem to harm this device are the lack of RAM in the system (mine only has 128MB RAM) and the sub-par processor less than 1GHz.  If you have one, then you may be able to make it work for you, however if you are considering one, I’d stay clear.  It’s not worth the price they are asking for it at CVS.

A couple of comments left by Syed and Dave to the original CVS netbook post indicates that there are people out there that are able to get Android running on this device.  If you have information or an article written on how you did it, let me know in the comments.  I’m interested in trying it out and finding out what works on this machine.

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13 Comments for this entry

  • Bob MC

    Hi Firestorm

    Thanks for the great tutorial! Snagged the netbook for thirty thinkig it’ll be a nice linuxbox.

    I’m having a weird issue with the ect3 file. For some reason I can’t copy it to any flash drive or SD card. I’ve tried two of each, those aren’t faulty. I’ve also tried EXT2, EXT3, and EXT4 formats. It will run for a couple of seconds, freeze, and maybe fifteen minutes later come up with “Drive doesn’t have enough space.” I’ve also tried setting this up on three different computers using Windows 7, XP, and Knoppix. Do you (or anyone) have an idea about this really strange problem? I can’t seem to figure it out.

    The errors it comes up with are “Error making symbolic link”, “Error creating directory”, “Error creating directory”; these are all followed by “No space left on disk.”

  • Technicien

    Hello
    My wireless book stuck on ” loading device drivers” Help me please!!

  • l0xy

    Greetings Firestorm. Thanks for your research/work with this device.
    I’ve encoutered the following roadblock in attempting to update the WinCE OS and need your insight:
    Upon copying the extracted files to a usb stick, and attempting to execute “Autorun” on the netbook, I am presented with a brief screen saying
    “is Autoformat NAND disk?”. It counts down in seconds, to then display the following error:

    “System disk no existed”!

    Why is this? How can I get past this?
    Please Assist.

  • firestorm_v1

    I’m honestly not sure. I haven’t used my netbook in ages. It sounds to me like there is an issue reading the flash memory in the netbook. Does it boot normally when you reboot it without the USB stick or the SD Card inserted?

    Good luck!

    FIRESTORM_v1

  • firestorm_v1

    I honestly don’t remember what all I’ve done with my netbook. I used it for about four months after I wrote this article and then upgraded to an Eee PC that someone traded me some hardware for. If it’s not working, you may want to disable wireless and go with wired ethernet. I really wish I had a further recommendation for you, but it appears that the hacking community for these things has all but died out.

    Good luck!

    FIRESTORM_v1

  • firestorm_v1

    Hmm, that’s an odd one. Usually I get those errors from weak controllers and/or bad partitioning. I used 2GB and 4GB cards on my test and didn’t have any problems. Be careful, Windows doesn’t speak EXT3 and may freak out when it tries to write to a partition. I would recommend trying it again with a 4GB card.

    Good Luck!

    FIRESTORM_v1

  • Bambooz

    I got one of those “netbooks” for free because there was a password on the WinCE install -> useless.

    Managed to install Android (pretty damn simple) however, the older Version (1.6 “Donut”) which comes with the android market (app store, now called google play) is some sort of “demo OS” which refuses to work after a certain date (it’ll still boot, but there’s a message overlay ontop of everything that “this version has expired!”)
    Other than that it worked fine (installed an IRC client from the market, wifi worked, sound worked, UI wasn’t ridiculously choppy as I expected it to be on a 300MHz CPU)

    Another version (2.2 “Froyo”) works fine, however whoever idiot cobbled this together removed all the stock android apps (including the market) and replaced it with sketchy crap-apps which don’t work anymore because they’re 2+ years old and lacking the market, you can’t update them easily.
    I’m currently trying to get “google play services” installed which hopefully will allow me to install the play store / market app and make it more useful.

    Android installation is straightforward. Just unpack the archives and plonk them into the root of a SD card (min. 128MB).
    Put the card into the netbook, connect the AC adapter (!) and turn it on. Installation will start and run through on its own. When it’s done, it’ll ask you to remove the SD card. It switches off after that. First boot might take quite long.
    Installation is the same for both 1.6 demo and 2.2

    I’ll post another comment tomorrow with the links of the files I’ve used. It’s 2:20 in the morning here right now and uploading about 130MB with 0.6mbps upload would take forever.. 😛

  • John

    Is there a way to get Linux set up on the SD card using Windows? Windows won’t recognize EXT3 partitions so I can’t copy the necessary files over to it. Kind of frustrating.

  • firestorm_v1

    Hello John:

    I am not entirely sure to be honest. Most of my computers run Linux so for me it’s not very hard to make an EXT3 partition. I do not know if there is a way to make an EXT3 partition in Windows. If you are really desperate to get this working, you can try doing so using VirtualBox and spinning up a Debian virtual machine. Virtualbox USB support is pretty decent, so if you map your card reader to the Virtual USB of your new Debian VM, you should be able to make filesystems as needed.

    Good luck!

    FIRESTORM_v1

  • Salvi

    Foolishly I bought one of the netbooks to see what it was like. After a while it would no longer boot and I threw it in a drawer. Reciently I tried your setup for an SD card and got it to boot however it came up to a login like the admin password was already set. Not sure how to get around this.

  • firestorm_v1

    Hello Salvi:

    Hmm, it’s been literally ages since I’ve even dug mine out of the drawer. The default account is “root” and there is no password. See if that will get you into the Sylvania.

    Good Luck!

    FIRESTORM_v1

  • lrussell

    I just wanted to let you know that the community for these devices has shrunk, but not disappeared. There is a working Linux 3.16 kernel for these devices, although it still needs some tweaking.

    Current issues:
    -Screen is dim by default, fixable with command (and should be an easy fix for permanent)
    -WiFi isn’t working, Ethernet is.
    -Sound doesn’t work, and probably won’t ever.

    If interested, visit this Group:
    https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!forum/vt8500-wm8505-linux-kernel

    Or, go here for the kernel (look in the comments): https://www.coldplug.net/public/node/18

  • Marcel

    Debain 5 (Lenny) is “out of service” or the support ends. After import new PGP keys of the repro and canged the repros to the archive I could updated and install my local keyboard layout. I decided to test an upgrade to Debian 6 (Squeeze), but that does not work. I think the kernel have to be cross-compiled …
    At the other side: I’m looking for an newer image of Bento Linux.