Please note - Ndiyo has now officially closed its doors, at least as a legal entity - but we've kept the site alive in case any of the information is useful to others.
Our thanks to all those who helped out and were involved in so many different ways! The Ndiyo legacy lives on in the ultra-thin-client work at its spin-off DisplayLink, at Plugable, at NoPC and elsewhere...
Open Source Hubster is now in reach
Just over two years ago, we described and did our first demonstrations of what became known as 'Hubster' - a terminal based on a USB hub. By simply plugging in USB peripherals you can turn a single-user machine into a multi-user machine.
The key to this was DisplayLink's graphics-over-USB technology, which meant that as well as a USB keyboard and mouse, you could have a USB-connected display. Unfortunately, Ndiyo's limited resources prevented us from exploiting this idea to the degree that we would have liked, and for licensing reasons beyond our control we could only release binary versions of our example software.
In the last couple of months, however, there have been exciting developments following DisplayLink's release of Open Source libraries for products based on its USB chips. The user community has been very active, and Roberto De Ioris has written an X Windows driver based on this which allows desktop sessions to be created on DisplayLink-enabled devices.
Bernie Thompson has written and released some scripts which create these sessions and connect them to USB keyboards and mice.
The whole process is still some way from being very user-friendly, but those able to do a bit of hacking can now create their own Hubster systems. And we hope it won't be long before the Hubster concept is a standard part of Linux distributions.
For more information about the Hubster concept, please see our original description and then take a look, for more technical details, at the libdlo wiki...
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