Linux device developers not weird, just mainstream
Developers putting Linux on consumer devices aren't weirdos mining a niche, according to the Intel man who last year volunteered to help maintain embedded Linux. David Woodhouse told the CE Linux Forum on Tuesday embedded Linux is the computing mainstream thanks to the ubiquity of Linux on millions of media players, PDAs, mobile …
It's true, you know. I may run Linux on all my PCs but I didn't even know my TV ran on Linux until I flicked through the manual. I was surprised, to say the least.
For instance, the useless one-off crap that comes on eeePCs... why do all that work when it's probably a lot easier to port straight Debian and put Asus logos on the desktop background?
Then there's the crap on the Nokia N800s, where there's proprietary bits scattered all through, especially in the battery handling, GPS, and weird boot sequence. You can't (until recently) upgrade the OS without completely reloading the flash with a new image, losing all your installed apps and customizations, even though it was fully apt-package-based.
Crap like that is what turns it into a niche market. All I want is a small N810-style tablet with a touchscreen and slide-out keyboard and an ARM processor, that runs plain 'ol Debian, with something lightweight for the window manager instead of KDE/GNOME. An eeePC in an N810 form factor.
Companies need to stop the "because we can" one-off proprietary embedded crap.
But not like James Le Cuirot's ... I use MythTV & a dumb monitor. It works pretty well.
A quick mental exercise suggests that other than the computers, we have seven or maybe eight devices that run Linux scattered about the place (I'm not sure about the barn's DSL box, and I can't be arsed to break out an ethernet cable to telnet in and look). That's pretty mainstream.
