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LinuxBIOS Gets GUI

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the well-isn't-that-pretty dept.

LWATCDR writes "Has a great write up on combining LinuxBios a Linux kernel, busybox, X, a window manager, and rxvt into a two meg flash chip. So what does get you? A six second boot time for one. All sorts of uses come to mind. Terminals to use with the Linux Terminal server. A very fast booting embedded system like a Car computer. With every one pushing for multi-core cpus, mega gigabyte drives and many gigabytes of ram it is interesting to see how small you can go."

3 of 171 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Two megs? by vidarh · · Score: 4, Interesting
    You do realize there's more than one X server out there, don't you?

    For example, Xvnc only takes about 800KB compressed. Yes, it doesn't display, but bolting a framebuffer driver onto it would only take a few KB - in fact you could fit both Xvnc and a full featured vnc client into less than 1MB. There are at least a few small "proper" X servers (that drives a display instead of keeping it's own frame buffer) out there that would fit in 2MB too - I only mentions Xvnc since that's the only one I happen to have installed.

  2. FBUI by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Ahh...but then there's also FBUI, which is a full blown GUI system that runs as an in kernel module (~50k). Has some light weight libraries for interfacing with it. Would save tons more room than kdrive with all this other stuff. No networkable hooks though

  3. Re:Good to see by ThogScully · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The initial OpenMokos have just shipped to developers. They'll hopefully be more generally available toward the end of this year. I'm excited to get one as soon as I can, and no I'm not affiliated with them - I just think they are doing some awesome work.
    -N

    http://www.openmoko.com/

    --
    I've nothing to say here...