Latitude ON Reader...

Too bad, in my case I was expecting to be able to access at least the hard drive.

As I understand, there is no way to do actual "work" offline. No HDD/USB/card reader access, so there is no way to save anything while running Latitude ON and get it back in normal mode, you have to be online and save it on the network.

Latitude ON becomes useless in a plane/train, where the extended battery life could have been interesting.

We could hope it's only a software restriction, but I'm not sure the hardware makes it possible to access the HDD from the notebook CPU.

 

Good point. Did not think of the use case for offline usage on train/plane. However more and more trains and planes provide power for laptops.

Hopefully some limitations might change in the future with (for example) Google Gears and maybe Evolution supports offline mode?

 

Yep, no need for Latitude On in that case.

If you can't write on your disk, a crash/shutdown and you lose your data.

I guess the Latitude On ECM card has a small flash on it to host the embedded linux, hopefully a part of it is not read only while running.

In that case, to make it possible to upgrade the firmware, it must be possible to access this flash from the Intel CPU, so there could be a way to exchange your data between the two systems.

Latitude On's only exclusive feature is the extended battery life, we can get fast-boot/instant on with custom Linux distribution running on the Intel CPU and HDD without the cost of losing all other computer features. They really should make sure you can do something useful in offline mode.

 

True. And I hope like you that the small flash will be read/write. It needs to save the configuration for Evolution/Firefox somewhere and since the config is wiped with every firmware upgrade I would guess that it is stored in the same area (the flash). So it should be r/w.
R/W is good because it should then be easier to "hack".

I was going to say that boot speed is something that the Lat ON has compared to other solutions (Like gOS Cloud) but on the other hand with a SSD drive compared to Flash the boot speed should be the same. So as you say, battery time is really the only advantage. (plus built in support for the WLAN-card and the WWAN which as always might be tricky with Linux..)

 

Latest I heard from a Dell Sales rep here in Sweden is 16th of February. Which is more of a internal placeholder date than committed date.

So I would say the current situation is that Dell right before Christmas released the documentation (see my other post in this thread) and are preparing for a release where a release might be next month or the month after that...

 

Dell quoted me today to get my backlit keyvaord installed on my E4200.

They still don't know when the Latitude ON hardware will be available

 

For a Swedish keyboard or some other language?

 

Just curious how you determined this. I've got the reader, but I only see three partitions:

1) dell diagnostics
2) restore
3) user ntfs

Where do they hide the Latitude-on partition?

Has anybody tried replacing the L-on software with something else (like a regular linux distro invoked from the L-on button)?

 

I believe it's a disk image, not an actual partition.

 

Sorry to burry up an old thread but its almost June, quite a bit past "Late 2008" and still no LatitudeON? What's this all about? Any news?