I just got a brand new Dell E4300 with the "Latitude On", which is a card with an ARM cpu that runs a fast-boot and low-consumption Linux . The way this is setup is that it reads information from the main NTFS partition and allows one to read email, access the net, etc. It seems from my short investigations that this thing depends on the Win OS on the NTFS partition.

However since the ARM card is there on the machine, it should be possible to install a different linux distro there without depending on mswin. I'd love to do this, has anyone cracked it? (how to activate the ARM hardware, etc)?

I need to install slackware very soon on this machine, so the mswin partition is on its way out (no, I don't want to dual boot with mswin, only ARM-linux and x86_64-linux)

Help!

The ARM "distro" that you are referring to may be a highly customized version of the Linux kernel with cross-built ARM ELF binaries for all the utilities and programs.

Unless you have some way of reading the FLASH on the ARM card, the only people who could help you "crack" it, would be Dell (or whatever contractor that Dell hired to create the Linux image).

Even if you got the cross-build utilities from Dell or the contractor, you would need some method of reading and writing the FLASH. Look around for some way to open a terminal window while running from the ARM card. After that, see if you have "dd". If so, you can read the contents of FLASH by running "dd" on the devices in "/dev/mtdblockN", where N is a number.

If you don't have a way of opening a terminal window, see if you can download a cross-built version of xterm to the ARM card. It should be running a RAM file system, so you should be able to use the web browser to download files to it (unless they only allow you to download to the NTFS partition on the hard drive).

Your statement here does not make sense to me. I am aware of Dell's Latitude-ON feature, but be aware that Dell offers 2 distinctly different products under this brand.

Latitude-ON Card: (Hardware option)
An ARM based SoC Card with embedded Montavista Linux firmware. Operates entirely from the the card, does not use any of the PC's components beside LCD, Keyboard & Touchpad. Offers Internet access, VPN support and direct always on connection to your mail/groupware server. (This card does everything online & does not touch the hard drive)

Latitude-ON Reader: (Software option)
No hardware involved. A fast booting embedded Linux compiled into a disk image file is installed into the hard drive. An Outlook connector service is installed to sync the 100 most recently cached Exchange Emails, Contact & Calendar entries into a Linux readable data file. Latitude-ON Reader is a read-only solution, it does not offer internet access nor even any ability to reply emails.

Both of these are custom engineered firmware and so far it's not popular enough for anyone to care much about it. You can be the one to kick it off.

I would love to be able to combine this option with the ability to save e-mail to the hard drive using ntfs-3g. Sometimes I just want to check an e-mail without waiting 3 minutes and I only use webmail access on rare occasions. I have a dual Windows/Ubuntu setup where I can check e-mail from either O/S and the downloaded files get saved to the NTFS partition, so I know the concept works. Now I just need to get my hands on one of the machines with the ARM card.

Ooh... Unfortunately I have (had) the software option. Good thing that I already wiped out the disk and installed Slackware leaving no trace of previous disfunctional OS (but I still have to remove the sticker).

From your description the hardware version looks even more attractive (since it does not depend on the host OS). It would be great to have an ARM-based machine to use the net and have very long life battery.

BTW, the Dell E4300 is a very nice machine and Slackware recognized all the hardware.

Hi metageek, does Slackware regconized all the hardware? what about bluetooth, fingerprint reader?

I have Ubuntu on my Dell E4300 but bluetooth not working and fingerprint reader seem not to be supported by any distro Linux