Hubster developments
July 16th, 2007 by quentin
Michael and I got a couple of new toys for the Ndiyo office. We took them out of the box and plugged them in, ran some of our experimental software, and they just worked.
So we decided to point a camcorder at them and make a little movie…
We’re biased, of course, but we think this is pretty cool. It doesn’t have the range and reliability of a standard Ndiyo system, but it could be very easy for anybody to put together. We’ll work on it.
July 18th, 2007 at 10:57 am
‘ Due to licensing restrictions, we expect to release a binary-only driver initially through our sister company, Cambridge Visual Networks. ‘
Why are you contaminating the linux kernel with proprietary drivers?
Could you please elaborate your reasoning?
The device itself looks very interesting.
July 18th, 2007 at 1:24 pm
Hi John -
It’s not a kernel driver, it’s an X driver. As I’m sure you know, there are many binary-only ones of those.
My (personal) view on this is to strive for Open Source wherever possible, but where it isn’t (as in this case where the licensing is not something over which we have control) then it’s much better to have some Linux support for a piece of hardware than none at all.
July 19th, 2007 at 6:23 am
Sorry. I wasn’t thinking very clearly. I went to DisplayLink’s site and found, under products, potential applications :
Ethernet-based Thin Clients
Use one server PC to power several Ethernet-connected thin client
Deploy terminals at very low cost connected only by Ethernet
Windows XP and Linux compatible
Excellent performance with low-latency interactivity
Mirror or extend a computer display workspace
Easy to secure by keying each terminal to a server PC
Which sounds interesting.
July 19th, 2007 at 6:24 am
Yes, that’s basically what we’re doing. (Amongst other things!)
August 2nd, 2007 at 1:07 pm
Hmmm… on the video, when he starts Firefox, it looks as if he’s presented with the dialogue box that you get when your computer crashes & it asks you if you want to restore the previous session or start a new one. Ubuntu crashing? Sounds unlikely - so what’s really happening? Or does this inherently make the OS more unstable?
August 2nd, 2007 at 5:52 pm
Hi eth - well noticed - yes, it IS the indication that the last Firefox session died. However, you can take heart, this is nothing to do with Ubuntu, or Ndiyo, unreliability!
It’s simply that we start up and kill off X sessions all the time as part of our development experiments. Sometimes we forget to shut down the applications cleanly before we do this… like just before we start filming!