overstimulate

i-opener to eee pc

Tue, 11 Dec 2007 comments

When I entered grad school, I decided to work on an open source project that used SDL to learn about graphics/game programming. I found a Tux Typing, and soon became a regular contributor. It was fun, and I still hear from folks who used it or their kids did. Eventually I became the project leader and learned a lot (since then others have taken the torch - since it is open source others came along and just started coding, then adopting it :) ).

Today my asus eee pc ultra-portable linux laptop came in. It is a really cool machine, and it includes Tux Typing (hey Asus - you should send me a free 8G model). What makes it particularly interesting is that my dev machine when I was coding on Tux Type was a Netpliance i-opener.

The specs were awesome: WINChip C6 180MHz, 32MB Dram (SODIMM), 16MB Sandisk Flash On Board, 10" color lcd 800x600 16bpp - of course I upgraded to 128MB ram, and used an external hard drive. It was no speed daemon, but it was a fun little device. The Asus feels the same way, except it has 900 Mhz pentium, 512MB ram (soon to be 2GB), 4GB flash (got 8GB SD card coming, plus it takes USB drives), and a 800x480 screen. I cannot wait to get my dev environment going on it. Debian etch net install, followed by a very minimal X environment (wmii, firefox, gvim maybe?), and then git/ruby/... It will be a few weeks before I'll have time to even think about upgrading the OS, so hopefully others will have blazed the trails on getting a good debian environment going.

Perhaps with this slower machine I'll be able to make Taboo fast for Kragen.


Responses to "i-opener to eee pc"

  1. Wed, 12 Dec 2007 Soyapi says:
    Cool to see that you used to use an i-Opener. We are still using them at Baobab Health. We modify them to become touchscreen devices powered over Ethernet and install them in Health centers in Malawi. They run Firefox in full screen mode as an interface to a Ruby on Rails HIV Treatment application. Check it out at http://baobabhealth.org

Leave a response

My Card Add to your Address Book

Jesse Andrews
open source, web browsers, web services, web sites & folk dancing. contacts/sites

Keep Up To Date

Get updates via RSS or
get email when I blog

Previous Blog Posts