Just a heads up for those (3 or 4 at most) of you, who
like myself perhaps,
entertain the idea from time to time of
doing something like converting some Win 8 thingy
into a replacement for your n900.

Ain't gonna happen without a miracle,
because these things cause a lot of heartbreak
and will guzzle your time and effort:

SDIO - holier-than-thou-canst imagine throughput
BROADCOM - where did it go and what did I say to make it pout?
SoC - Ship-on-Chit: pureed somebody else's junk,
spooled up nicely on what was once a valuable piece of substrate

BayTrail - Intel descended into uncharted depths with this one.
They scraped the septic tanks of some prison for BayTrail.


I already hosed some money for Nexus 7 and
a few other Android junkware to try that route
and I quickly discovered why Canonical almost gave up
on slipping Ubuntu Touch into an Android hardware port.
Android hardware is unblemished 100% pure rubbish.
Junk, floor-scappings hot-glued into looking pretty.
Trying to run anything on Android hardware is hopeless,
unless it is a f@rtapp or a simple SMS app
geared at the tanda "gee look - I have elbows !?!" crowd.


I have been (along with some other much more intelligent folk)\
trying to hack linux onto Intel's Bay Trail SoC

I do not and never will ever again refer to Soc
as being any kind of
System on a Chip
That is the most inaccurate label anyone could ever dream up.

What SoC means
(and this also refers to virtually the entire android universe,
as far as I can tell)
is that somebody thought they could fashion a device
saving money with short bus runs that are internal to the device
and inaccessible from the outside.

What it means is that, like with most Android
(and very inclusive of the way n900 architecture was designed)
any substantial system modification needs to be performed
in an environmental simulator.
The resulting kernel/filesystem/etc
must be loaded (ala bootloader) on a kind of game-of-chance
hope/daydream/maybe-we-get-lucky-this-time effort
to concoct a working system.

It all goes together like those old sailing ships you see
constructed so nicely inside of glass bottles.

Bv115h!t!

You have Broadcoms "Wifi and Bluetooth - pick one"
chips that even the makers gave up on the STA firmware
to make it work. It even fails on Win 8 (wifi or Bt - choose 1 ! )
Talking through a stuttering SD interface that makes USB
look like heaven.

And all this is clamped into a Bay Trail walled garden
that does not even have all the power pins wired correctly.
I kid you not. They forgot to wire it correctly and
then suckered the marketplace before fixing the faults.

SoC is someone's idea of what a computer should be
and unlike those of us who have actually spent years
throwing together motherboards and choosing the best
available hardware and coaxing new firmwares into place,
the people who are throwing these SoC's together
have not one fr@kking clue about how to leave a system
with the latitude to be revised by firmware/software.

It is so utterly embarrassing to see what INTEL is doing
to the basic linux kernel with all their patches, quirks,
and other buggery to make their flaws even turn on
that it makes me wonder how the kernel guys manage
to look themselves in the mirror each morning.

I have almost always bought Intel hardware as default
(I am not risk averse to trying the competitors,
but they were always way off the open-source radar).
When they launched the z500 I got burnt badly by
the Poulsbo/powerVr debacle and I was careful for a very long time
Until Bay Trail launched and this time they have really screwed up.

Anyways,
look for a Celeron or i3/i5 if you insist on the masochist highway.
Just so somebody else knows. (or try an AMD ?)

I will not clutter this post with a bunch of links,
simply google (DuckDuck) Adam Williamson
and some of the other guys
trying to slap Fedora/Ubuntu/Arch or whatever onto
BayTrail
They try to keep a positive attitude but the reality shows through.