Splashtop instant-on Linux hacked
INSTANT-ON OPERATING SYSTEMS are quickly becoming fashionable on a variety of motherboards.
ASUS has been one of the main advocates of the technology, and has recently employed the use of its Splashtop Linux-based OS on the majority of its motherboards and notebook products. ASUS brands the software 'Express Gate'.
Splashtop comes bunded with Firefox, Skype, IM, and media-playback applications, and is embedded within the computer's BIOS - though the majority of the underlying applications are installed to local storage.
This means it bypasses the computer's usual OS, and is higly optimised for a quick boot.
But though Splashtop provides a variety of useful applications, users (and hackers) have wanted more - and it seems they're getting what they want.
Members of the Phoronix forums have successfully manipulated the underlying Linux-based operating system to support a much larger range of applications.
The hackers have been able to run Splashtop from a USB stick on non-ASUS motherboards, boot Splashtop within a virtual machine, run custom applications, and launch a Linux terminal within the OS.
Devicevm, the company behind Splashtop, had previously mentioned opening up the application environment and possibly releasing an SDK, to allow user-installable applications.
The company has also added a variety of new features to the OS including DVD-playback, photo management and virtualisation support.
This, however, hasn't been sufficient to keep the hackers at bay. µ
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keep hacking more and more functionality into it, bloat it all to hell, increase the boot time no end and slap a MS badge on it :oP
If this was a MS OS they would be facing threats and writs and goodness only knows. But GNU general public license surely means this is all kosher, hardly hacking so much as engineering development?

Couldn't let this pass without mentioning that MS still dont get it, the world & spouse & dog want faster OS. MS seem to think that all the increased hardware power is for them to use to have fun with bulking their OS, its not, its for us consumers to use running programmes on an OS that should be faster and leaner than last generation not slower, you know, like the hardware.

So Asus deserve admiration and sales for serving the user and the "engineers" deserve yet more admiration for taking it further. Add that kind of thing to a Nano or Atom and you have a handy little device.

MS deserve a wet raspberry and I am not talking about yet another frugiform brand micro-device.
A very light Splashtop booting directly on the browser homepage would be very useful in mobility!!