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Linux Desktop to Appear On Every Asus Motherboard
An anonymous reader writes "We first heard about Splashtop back in October, when the instant-on Linux desktop was announced. At the time it was a really exciting concept but Asus only rolled out the technology on high-end motherboards. Splashtop just announced that Asus will be expanding the desktop to the P5Q motherboard family and later on to all Asus motherboards. That's embedded Linux shipping over a million motherboards a month! The release also mentioned that the technology will be appearing on notebooks this year as well."
It's that damned juvenile geek.com, and TFA's not much longer than the summary.
And it ends with "Read the press release" that the submitter should have linked in the first place rather than that incredibly BAD geek.com) "here".
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
> This will not happen until the Linux Kernel has native support
..where by I can double click on a single file and have it install a
> for an install mechanism...
By writing this you reveal yourself to be clueless. The kernel would never do anything so complex, that is what userspace is for. But anyway, assuming you really mean a Linux distro....
>
> whole program including notifying and automatically installing
> programs it is dependent upon.
And just where have you been the last five years? Most RH/RPM based distros will do just that. Click on an RPM package and it will ask if you want to install it. But nobody smart does it like that. At most you would use the click to install bit to install a REPO and then just use the same package manager you use to install the distro supplied packages.
Why limit yourself to the old painful way Microsoft and Apple do things when technology is being innovated over here in Linux/UNIX land? What could be more convienent than adding a repository once and then making that 3rd party software collection a seamless part of the system. You get automatic notifications through the update widget, exactly the same as if it were included from the original OS vendor.
Democrat delenda est
People get so excitable every time they hear the word "linux". But the fact is, this is not really Linux, not in a form that people would run as an OS.
It's just a way that Asus found to leverage something that is free, in order to avoid having to write their own own code for motherboard diagnostics and such. No one is going to "switch to linux" because their motherboard has a linux based diagnostic included.
Maybe Asus will put the work "Linux" in bold letters of the mobo box, but this will not do anything. It will not "bring linux to the masses", because anyone who's actually buying a motherboard (as opposed to buying a pre-built computer), already knows what Linux is and will either run it, or not.
I don't think they're misunderstanding, they just disagree. I'll put it this way: I just switched to Linux this past January and I'm extremely happy with it. With the exception of the wireless in my laptop (Broadcom), it was incredibly easy to get Ubuntu (and a few other distros I was messing around with) up and running, and be able to play around with it.
I was completely illiterate with regard to command line stuff, but I've figured out a great deal along the way. Even when I first began, installing packages was probably the single easiest thing to do in the OS. Installing a package from Synaptic is ridiculously easy, and it grabs all the dependencies an application needs. Anyone with so little knowledge of how computers work that they can't figure out a package manager is someone who wouldn't be doing anything like installing their own programs in Windows, so that's really not a fair comparison.
This is how it is implemented. I have the P5E3 PREMIUM. The Linux boot is called Express Gate. It boots in about 5 seconds and gives the option to go into bios, the installed OS, or the express gate. You can use email, web browser, skype, and use flash drives (I believe this was first implemented to help update the bios more easily). Uses Splashtop desktop. Here's some quick info on it.