Big news, our new shopping cart is up, it is available here http://www.pengpod.com/pengstore. The old cart has been moved to pengpads.com for the moment if you want to look up or otherwise interact with your old order.  We are moving all the orders that have yet to ship into the new system to speed up our order processing.  Hopefully we will be able to transfer all the credentials as well so you can soon monitor your old order from the new site.  Also the new site is integrated with your login on pengpod.com so you will not have to make a new account.  If you have an old pre-order and have not yet paid, we recommend you just make a new order on the new site, it should actually improve your shipping time because of the book keeping involved in chasing down PayPal payments.  You will have to enter your address and other information for your first order, as those were not required to register at pengpod.com.  Please let us know if you run into any problems on the new cart site.

The biggest new feature is the cart is able to authorize cards without capturing funds.  So from now on we will not be collecting payment until the actual day of shipment.  I want to apologize again for how long we have had some of your funds without shipping.  Since this new cart software has much better shipping integration we should be able to improve how fast we can ship orders and our goal is to have all the orders out by the end of next week.  I'll post more here as we know it.

I know everyone is anxious to get their PengPod.  We have received our new batch and we should be able to fill all the standing orders now.  We are trying to get a new shipping management system online today.  With that we should be able to start shipping a lot faster.  I'll most another update as soon as thats ready.

Our host switch is complete, we are now on blue host and things seem to be working much better.  We think everything is up except for shop.pengpod.com.  We did lose a few blog and forum post in the move, I am going to see if we can restore them but its probably best to just repost.  The old stick is online at http://pengstick.com/forum in case you forgot what you typed.

There is a bug in the camera driver and we've got a fix for it.  We are working on packaging now so that an apt-get upgrade will load up the camera driver by default.  The process is going well so we hope to have that fix posted tomorrow.  Also as a side effect this will bring in a lot more drivers to the default kernel so everyone who has been asking for USB serial, 3G modem drivers or probably anything else, this update should have you drivers.  More info when its ready.

A user, khanning has created an unofficial CM10 port for the PengPods.  It is still missing a few features but you can find out more here .  I am downloading it now and will upload it to our new download site pengpod.net/dl soon.  There have been some other interesting user ports to bodhi Linux and others lately as well.  Since we are having a slow shipping week waiting on product, I will try and highlight some of those this week.

We have been getting a lot of complaints about downloads failing.  I think this is GoDaddy overloading the shared server, so I've got a new host.

The download links are here now http://pengpod.net/dl/images/  I would like to hear results from everyone, we are considering swapping all our hosting services.

The international PengStick perks shipped today.  We have the US ones ready to go tomorrow and then all perks should be shipped, except those lacking an international shipping payment.

We have posted a script to fix the on flash devices only showing 512Mb of ram.  The instructions and link are here http://pengpod.com/pengwiki/index.php?title=It_only_shows_512MB_of_ram_on_my_PengPod_with_Linux_on_internal_memory

You should end up seeing this after install

root@linaro-alip:~# free
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:        834772     131092     703680          0      10464      69028
-/+ buffers/cache:      51600     783172
Swap:            0          0          0

A few people have commented on the fact that it is not the full 512 or 1Gb.  This is because the Allwinner chip reserves memory for the mali and cedar on board acceleration hardware.  If you require all memory there is a recent community patch that will allow you to set this has a kernel command line option.  If you are interested, you can read more about it here https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/linux-sunxi/Add$20sunxi_*_mem_reserve$20kernel$20cmdline$20options/linux-sunxi/WXMXDfvOLGY/XgWyTYvdJawJ

So more tips, openssh-server is the dependent package that actually runs sshd.  So if you want to use ssh but don't want to leave your own port open, you can just 'sudo apt-get remove openssh-server'.

Well we boxed up 50 or so orders today but the post office is closed so they are on the way tomorrow. 

Also a user has pointed out the the sshd daemon is installed on our image by default.  We had this on our testing images because it was so handy for testing.  So given that the default password is easy to guess/discover for these devices it presents a security risk.  I recommend you either remove ssh with 'sudo apt-get remove ssh', change the default password or delete the Linaro account if you are not using it.  Since sshd isn't in its own package you will be losing ssh as well.  I haven't looked into this but the daemon can probably be disabled easly while leaving the package in place but I wanted to post it up as soon as it came to my attention.

Thanks go to Mr. Hjortland for that tip.

First just a clarification, perks != preorders.  Perks are the shipments to people who contributed to our project on Indiegogo, pre-orders are anyone who ordered from shop.pengpod.com after, in December or later basically.  We are working to ship the pre-orders as fast as we can but all the notices where I say the perks are mostly shipped do not include pre-orders.

Ok, on to the news. I have uploaded two new images, linaro-min and mer  www.pengpod.com/dl/images and the new site www.pengpod.net/dl/images. 

Linaro-min .  This is similar to our standard Linaro image but has no windows manager, it just boots to a prompt. This is a good for anyone looks for a minimal or server type image or just wants a base to start adding on something else they want.  This is also good if you are having trouble making an SD card as its a faster download and quicker write.  This is the base we use when creating our 'flashing' cards for install Linux to the internal memory.  While posting this I am still uploading the 700 image.

Mer:  This is a work in progress.  This is a basically a snapshot of my previous attempts to use Mer.  It will boot to a console but X will not start.  I'm not quite sure what is wrong, maybe someone with more experience with Mer can work it out and share how they did it.  This will only work on the 1000 right now but if you copy the 700s script.bin from the boot partition over I think it will work the same on there, this is an older image from before U-boot became device dependent.

Enjoy!

Good news, we have the PengStick running well again.  We will test it over the weekend and should be shipping PengSticks on Monday.

I think all in all with shipped about 80 packages today.   We should have the perks out dont have an  exception, but 1 case where it was just a complex shipping arrangement and that one is going out tomorrow.  Many more pre-orders will be going out tomorrow. 

I know a lot of you are frustrated and again we apologize.  We didn't mean for everyone to wait this long or we wouldn't have taken payment.  We are getting a lot of request for updates about orders and we simply cannot respond to them all and get any work done on shipping so please understand if don't get back to you.  We are literally working every hour we are not sleeping over here for the last week so there really isn't any more we can do.  And again, we can't promise shipping dates, they will ship as soon as we can ship them.  If you cannot wait, we will happily give a refund as soon as it is requested.

Ok, so with the batch file just submitted to Amazon almost all the perks wihtout pengpods have shipped.  We have one more set of mostly just SD card perks that didn't make the post office today in time.  If by tomorrow your Perk hasn't shipped you are most likely in one of three categories

1) You have a PengStick in your perks

2) You are outside the US and didn't cover the international shipping

3) You requested an invoice for an additional item and haven't paid it yet.

We are going to be sending notices to groups 2 and 3 on Friday.  Also there has been a patch posted on the community mailing list that we think will fix up the PengStick images. 

We have shipped a few Pre-orders so far but we are trying to get a big batch out tomorrow.  We should have a better handle on the inventory situation tomorrow and will post an update then.

Because of the previously mentioned wifi issue popping up, we lost some time here.  We had lots of devices and SD cards ready to go Sunday but instead had to stop, reflash and recheck them all.  We are pretty much done and are now shipping again.  So it will probably be another day or two before any of the remaining perks are either all shipped or notified of why not.  Amazon is also holding 10 of the PengPod1000 shipments in limbo while investigating a bug in their flat file submission software.  It took almost 8 messages and finally 2 screen shots to convince them 178 != 168.  So if you are one of those 10 affected, sorry, it should be soon.

One last thing, if you placed a pre-order or order on the shop.pengpod.com site and want to cancel for any reason, please just email us about it.  Assuming you haven't shipped we will happily refund within 24 hours, no fuss, no muss.  We have had a few people submit disputes without asking first and we just want to make sure everybody knows.

Seems some of the tablets have a different chipset.  If you received your device and the wifi is not working, please try this http://pengpod.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=475&p=857#p857

More info tomorrow.

Some quick news today.  The Perk PengPod700s both international and domestic mostly shipped today and yesterday.   There are still some Perks that haven't shipped, mostly those with some issue, or a mix of devices.  We will be handling the rest of these that can ship by Monday and sending notices about shipments that can't seeking a resolution.  That should only leave the PengStick perks.

We wanted to get the pre-order shipping this week but they will starting Monday.

The US perks of PengPod 1000s shipped today, minus a few with 32GB cards that are still in receiving.  Some of the orders didn't parse the email address correctly so about 50 or so won't get the tracking email, sorry about that.

The US 700s and the rest of the 1000s will be shipping tomorrow.  If you have a mixed order of 700s and 1000s we are still reviewing those but they might get shipped tomorrow also.

About half of the international perks have shipped.  If yours is on the way you should have gotten a notification email with tracking info.  The first ones have already been delivered. 

Most of the US perks will be on the way tomorrow, again you should see a tracking email once yours is sent.

The only bad news at the moment is we have been so busy getting orders shipped we don't have the help and how to sections up yet.  I'm going to try and get back to that tomorrow.  Links will be posted here once its available.

The default user is linaro, password linaro, sudo will work without a password from this user.

For the pre-orders there is news too.  First off I want to thank everyone for their patience.  I know its kind of been a mess with the payments happening after the orders.  We are working on a better site to make this all easier, more on that below.

Our second order of devices took 2 weeks longer than we had hoped but they have arrived.  Our original plan was to get two runs out of the Factory before Chinese new year ground things to a halt.  That didn't happen so we are going to be a little short.  We wont know exactly how short until we finish QC of the latest shipment.  However we can make a pretty good estimate, at this point...

We probably will not be able to fill any new orders for PengPods until late February.

We will almost surely be short of PengPod 1000.  Orders in the 1700's range or later are likely to be effected.

We will probably have just enough 700's and PengSticks to meet existing orders.

We are short of some accessories but can get them quickly enough to not effect shipment times.

So most everyone who has ordered will be getting it very soon.  Shipping will begin immediately after the perks.  Some US orders will be sent right away from Amazon fulfillment with the extras from the crowd-funding shipments.  Others will be going out in a second wave after they reach the fulfillment centers.  Probably late in the week or early next week.  The international orders will be shipping directly, probably  after the fulfillment batch is on its way.

The PengSticks are going to be a little delayed as mentioned in the last post.

We will try to inform everyone whose order isn't shipping as soon as we can.  We will of course give a refund to anyone who request it.  It was not our intent to make anyone wait that long.  If we had known how much time the factory was going to take we wouldn't have started taking payments when we did. 

Since it looks like we will be back to taking pre-orders for a bit we are working on a new shopping cart site.  The new one will accept pre-orders without charging right away.  It will authorize the funds but wait to transfer them until we have product in hand.  We think this will make everyone more comfortable and prevent the big confusing snafu of trying to collect later.  It should also allow us to stream line some of the product details to make more sense.  More on that soon.