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Asus to ship all mobos with Splashtop instant-on Linux OS
Linux just got a major boost today with Asus confirming that it will extend the inclusion of the Splashtop pre-boot multimedia shell from just a few of its most expensive models to more products and eventually throughout its entire product range.
The technology, which debuted last October branded as Express Gate by Asus, is an instant-on Linux distro embedded on the motherboard in flash memory that allows users to run a browser, or other core applications on their PCs within seconds of hitting the power-on button. With Asus set to ship over a million mobos a month sporting the feature, this could be a turning point for Linux in reaching mass-market desktop PCs – whether people actually use it though is another thing.
DeviceVM, the company behind Splashtop, says it is also working with other manufacturers to incorporate Splashtop into their designs. Apparently, they plan to have numerous Splashtop-enabled motherboards, desktops, and laptops available in 2008, with the latter being particularly exciting as it could prove incredibly useful in extending battery life.
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User Comments (2)
Post a comment| phantasm66 on May 15, 2008 2:39 PM | Maybe soon it will be the norm that there will be a basic OS like this running and you'll run Windows as a virtual machine on top of that?
If Windows ran only as a virtual machine Microsoft could design it to be a lot more streamlined and bug free as it would only have to run as a VM and not have to support a vast range of hardware - you'd never have to worry about drivers or updating drivers or hardware incompatibilities of any kind. You'd probably wind up doing a lot more Splashtop updates and stuff though because if there was a lower level Linux OS running your main OS on top there would be lots of security attacks targetting that Splashtop, since taking that over would allow the whole Windows OS to be completely compromised. If you added a graphics card or something then the Splashtop OS would get drivers for that and your Windows OS wouldn't care. Windows could evolve to being a completely virtual OS that was pure .Net and completely hardware agnostic. One would be able to move one's Windows virtual machine seemlessly from one PC to another - or even onto other types of hardware as well.
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| Badfinger on May 18, 2008 3:16 PM | Wonderful start! Whooot!
I am sure other Linux vendors will want in on this too, about time we get mega fast OS in play, not sluggish bloatware.
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