It’s been only two days and already we’re up to 9% of our target, which is fantastic - thank you! You’ve asked a whole stack of questions, the answers to which are now incorporated as a FAQ on the campaign page.

Showing off the community-driven nature of the project, someone who wanted a French keyboard has offered to help modify the firmware on the embedded controller to do just that. This is exactly why we are a libre project - to encourage people to get involved. I’m thrilled that such involvement is already happening so early on.

We’ve also had a huge amount of discussion on various forums and mailing lists, including reddit, libreplanet, trisquel and so on. One particular question came up which was whether the A20 processor could do better than framebuffer, and the answer is yes! Check out this announcement.

Getting the Xorg / X11 FbTurbo driver up and running on Parabola ARM GNU/Linux-libre was successful, and it includes 2D acceleration using the Allwinner A20’s G2D hardware. The initial setup last week was only a direct framebuffer X11 driver, which is known to be slow. Being able to use the 2D acceleration provides snappier and smoother response, reducing the load on the low-power A20 processor.