Thank you to our supporters! Here's what we'll work on: Thank you to each and every one of our supporters. I'm honoured by all of the positive talk about the project. Now that the campaign is over and funded, it's time to get started. Or rather, continue our work. If you've seen either bunnie or myself at conferences, you'll have seen us with our own Novenas. Late last year these were in suede clamshells, but lately we've been sporting the SLA-printed aluminium-bezeled prototypes that we'll eventually ship.
Progress report: Sleep, Audio, and Power It's been a month since my last post, and things are moving along. We've been hard at work improving both the hardware and software. There's a backer update describing much of what we've been up to, and snce I'm working with the kernel I'll go into some detail on the developments of the past month as well as what we're working on now. I'll talk about the three major areas of improvement in the last month: suspend/resume, audio, and power.
Novena First Run Right now, I'm in the middle of packaging up various bits and bobs for the final Novena disk image. We have a kernel mostly decided, and we have a base set of packages. Furthermore, we have a script that creates a bootable disk and installs all of the support packages onto it. Creating something you can build has always been a challenge. I've decided to use git-buildpackage, which prepares a Debian package file from a git repo.
Factory test We're doing the factory runs in batches, since there are multiple configurations of boards. Every board that leaves the factory will start out life as a "bare board", and will have features added to it later on. The factory test itself serves to do two things: Test the board, and load the board's firmware image. Since the firmware is so large and we have multiple cores, the task of writing the firmware is done in the background throughout the test as an "
Desktop Factory Test We've just shipped the desktop factory test off to the assembly line, and they'll soon begin the process of turning bare boards into desktop models. We ran the initial factory test -- the one I mentioned earlier -- on every board we produced. This first test ensures that the board is assembled correctly, has its own MAC address assigned, and has a root filesystem image. This test performed well, and actually caught an assembly error that prevented the Ethernet test from running.