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3COM's Ergo Audrey Hacked

Posted by timothy on from the nifty-tiny-cheap-pick-any-three dept.

It looks like the 3COM Ergo Audrey hacking scene is finally taking off. A guy named Sowbug has hacked the 3COM Ergo Audrey to shell. He has pictures of it here(1) and here(2). Another site has opened to cover this hack, here(3). And of course the Linux Hacker messageboards are covering it quite a bit.

1 of 134 comments (clear)

  1. Not a fake by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    You lazy dweebs, check the links before you distribute your ignorance to the world. I swear, /. is a colossal stupidity amplifier. As was widely reported (including here on Slashdot) Audrey ran QNX. So no, you wouldn't see any Linux in there. I was on the dev team for Audrey at 3Com, I've read the procedure described, and it would in fact work, he obtained a shell in a Photon pterm. I'm pleased to see that people will get some use out of the hardware. We put a lot of work into the thing, it was highly depressing that 3Com was/is in such financial trouble that it was terminated before we got a chance to rev software and address many of the complaints people had about the product. (I personally would like to buy all of the available inventory on Ebay and shove them one by one sideways up 3Com's inept CEO Bruce Claflin's ass, a sentiment shared by many of the company's long-suffering shareholders - but I digress). What is not widely known even within the product team was that there was an internal under-the-table project to run Linux on the Audrey almost from go. The big hang-up was getting X to run, and fit in the 16MB of flash in the Audrey. The main advantage to QNX was the availability of the Photon environment, which was a great deal lighter-weight than X with a toolkit.