Thinking Past Platforms: the Next Challenge for Linux (Linux Journal) [LWN.net]

Thinking Past Platforms: the Next Challenge for Linux (Linux Journal)

Posted Apr 16, 2007 16:13 UTC (Mon) by smitty_one_each (subscriber, #28989)
Parent article: Thinking Past Platforms: the Next Challenge for Linux (Linux Journal)

>One word sums all these up: freedom. That's what both the supply and demand sides of the market want. And they want to exercise that freedom together. This should be obvious, but it isn't. Yet. All that stands in the way is politics. (Attention HP, Lenovo, Sony and the rest of you: Take these clues before Dell does. Let's have some competition here.)

Vendors want you to be *strongly incentivized* to buy their products, and the definition of ethics becomes subjective when mere technical superiority won't carry the day.

TFA mentions politics, but avoids the point that software patents are what stifle innovation. If the system actually protected the individual innovator, perhaps I could warm to it. Seems to be a means for larger outfits to distort markets, in practice.

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Thinking Past Platforms: the Next Challenge for Linux (Linux Journal)

Posted Apr 16, 2007 17:28 UTC (Mon) by NRArnot (subscriber, #3033) [Link]

One thing that could help enormously is if some brave manufacturer would produce a fully open and expandable "wireless router plus".

Plus a graphics port
Plus several USB2 ports (and maybe PS/2 keyboard and mouse if cheap enough)
Plus a flash memory card slot
Plus a DIMM socket for RAM expansion
Plus fan-less (well all routers already are)

Ship it configured as a wireless router plus printserver plus file server (if you plug in a USB disk or memory stick) plus web browser (the killer new feature, instant casual web use with no need to boot your PC or leave it on whirring and wasting watts).

The other killer feature: make all information available so if anyone wants to boot linux configured differntly, they don't have to climb barriers like re-flashing the box (running the risk of turning it into a brick in the process). Just plug in a card or USB stick and boot it.

It might just start selling like hot cakes (and maybe put not a few vendors of vastly over-priced "thin clients" out of business).

Thinking Past Platforms: the Next Challenge for Linux (Linux Journal)

Posted Apr 16, 2007 18:25 UTC (Mon) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

Also another cool thing would be to work on getting hardware with embedded Linux in it.

For example you have the new PCI express specifications coming out that will alow OSes running in a VM to directly access PCIe cards.

So a clever thing a company can do with that is to run LinuxBIOS, or use EFI or whatever to boot embedded Linux system. Something small using a busybox environment or something like that.

So say you buy a new server and it gets delivered to your workplace. You take it into your datacenter and plug the thing into your network and boot it up.

The embedded system boots up, grabs a DHCP address and uses Zeroconfig/service discovery to announce it's precense. So you go back to your workstation, Avahi or whatever indicates your new server. You ssh into it or open up a webbrowser to it. Configure the RAID features, format the disks, download the system image and fire it up in a VM using Xen or Linux-KVM.

Then the embedded Linux system's network access can be disabled, but you can also keep it running and use it monitor hardware and run continious diagnostics on disks and other hardware. You can then use it further to manage more system images, manage disk snapshots, manage resource 'slices' and system image migrations and stuff like that. Whatever would work greater.

This sort of thing would nearly make PC hardware on par for high end Unix and Mainframe hardware in terms system management and the only cost would be that the OEMs would have to use open and well supported hardware and the cost of a little flash drive onboard the motherboard.

Thinking Past Platforms: the Next Challenge for Linux (Linux Journal)

Posted Apr 17, 2007 5:09 UTC (Tue) by jasonspiro (guest, #38047) [Link]

Hmm, I like your idea.

But meanwhile, as for the present: Are there already any small, low-power, commodity devices that can browse the web? My brother's Wii game system has an OK web browser; but, like all game consoles, the Wii is a closed platform. (As well, the Wii isn't really a commodity device yet, though that may change in the future.)