LinuxBIOS Gets GUI

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."

Re:Two megs?

[Sobrique]

In IT, size matters - small is good.

Explains a lot really :)

Good to see

[Cruise_WD]

Between this, and the Linux support for SIM cards, how long until we can make our own linux phone? A completely DIY phone might even tempt me to get one...

Re:Two megs?

[KiloByte]

MEBIBYTES

Please, stop this. The efforts by Academie Englaise to redefine the value of pi^H^Hmegabyte has failed miserably, and there is no reason to have this idea in a place other than MS Bob, UnifiedRoot or DOPA -- in the bit bucket where all asinine failed proposals go.

Re:Embedded linux

[Chmcginn]

Or if you installed it in one of those... ah... programmable marital aids... that might get used in a bed. Bedded, if you will.

Re:Impressive, but unnecessary

[Dielectric]

I think you missed the point. It's running a fully graphical Linux in 2MB of solid-state memory. It just happens to be residing in the BIOS chip, which means no other hardware is necessary to get a functioning system. I think it's awfully cool.

Re:Yeah, but...

[mr_mischief]

You're being humorous, and it's pretty fuinny. There's a point here just waiting to be made, though.

Since it's LinuxBIOS we're talking about, it could be a thin client which also has the option to boot off any drive the system is capable of using for boot. So while you can't fit the Windows installation into the BIOS flash, you could have a well-featured small Linux in the BIOS which then boots into Windows, OS/2, FreeBSD, NetBSD, other BSDs, Darwin, Solaris, a full Linux installation, or anything else that runs on the PCs LinuxBIOS can be the BIOS for.

PCs used to come with DOS in ROM, and QNX has had kernel+GUI+other stuff in this kind of space for years although I've never seen QNX on the BIOS flash. It's cool to see someone doing it with LinuxBIOS. EPOC/Symbian, WinCE/PocketPC, Palm, etc all have GUIs, too. Maybe something like this could lead Linux to be truly competitive in that kind of market eventually. I had Debian Small running on my Psion 5mx, which was really cool. Still, even having a Sempron, Celeron, Geode, or C7 board with no disk and no Compactflash that gives me a small, power-efficient smart terminal to stick in the living room or kitchen would be great.

Re:Two megs?

[Sparr0]

I think the hard drive industry might disagree with you. Everyone says it's just a recent marketting gimmick to cheat people out of space, but every HD I have ever bought, since 20MB was "huge", was rated in decimal multiples.

Oh yeah, DVDs are measured in decimal multiples too. 4.7GB == 4700000000B.

You're just on the losing side of a very long argument. It probably won't be over until English is history, but it will end in our favor eventually.

Re:Who are the idiots working on this project?

[drinkypoo]

You could be the idiot working on this project. You want additional hardware support? Join up and help produce it. People aren't idiots simply because they're not providing what you want. Alternatively you could also hire a developer for the period of time it takes to support your chosen hardware...

Re:Two megs?

[drinkypoo]

Why is it asinine to ask people to use words in a way that makes sense? Simply because some people are too stupid and/or obstinate to use words as they are meant? I mean, that's a good argument, but I still think that accuracy is more important than your comfort level.

Re:Two megs?

[heinousjay]

Hope springs eternal, apparently. All your "team" needs to realize is that when a word is clumsy in pronunciation (such as mebibyte) people won't use it.

Incorrect Slashdot article title:not LinuxBIOS GUI

[Anonymous Coward]

The title of the Slashdot article is completely incorrect and misleading.

The GUI shown is just a normal Linux GUI which runs after Linux has booted. The fact that its code is stored in the same flash device as the LinuxBIOS is just simple aggregation, and totally irrelevant.

It has nothing to do with the LinuxBIOS code at all, and it is certainly not a GUI for LinuxBIOS.

Great work in making it fit into 2 meg, but really bad Slashdot title.

Re:Two megs?

[ehrichweiss]

This has less to do with SI and more to do with a way to approximate the values in semi-easy-to-understand binary/hexadecimal representations. Since 1,024 was close to 1,000, the idea of 1024 bytes being a binary equivalent to a "kilo" was not a large leap and it's easier to remember 0x400 bytes equals a kilobyte than 0x3E8 bytes, or that 0x100000 bytes instead of 0xF4240 equals a meg. As programmers(or at least us low level language programmers) we live and breath in the binary world and rarely have to think in decimal terms comparatively.

What kills me is that I'm betting that a large majority of people who argue for the 1,000 byte kilobyte will gladly accept "ginormous", "omgwtfbbq" "aiiiggghttt"and "teh" and all the other language abuses and will see absolutely nothing wrong with their use. I'm sure that whoever dreamed up the "mebi" thing thinks they are making things easier but until us older programmers and hardware engineers die, that's not gonna take hold very well. Of course it speaks volumes that the term "mebi" is almost 10 years old now and still hasn't taken hold.

One might also note that memory is the reason we use these terms in the first place since hard drives and the like didn't come about for a long while so trying to make the language even more confusing, and garbled, because hard drive manufacturers want to skimp on drive size seems asinine, and they DO want to skimp on drive since formatting 160Gb, whether it's 160,000,000,000 bytes or 160x1024x1024x1024 bytes, only yields about 140,000,000,000 bytes.

Re:Two megs?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ahh, but the word "byte" was meaningless until someone determined (a few decades ago) that it would be 8 binary digits. Notice the use of the word "binary", as in "base-2". Thus the closest power in a base-2 system that approximates 1 million (base 10) is 1,048,576, therefore a megabyte (but not a megajoule, megaton, megalomaniac, or mega-maid) is 1,048,576 bytes, due to the implied number base in the use of that word.

Perhaps redefining the use of the word megabyte would've worked if they had instead simply supplemented it by making mebibyte be 1,000,000 bytes. (As in "mebi" you wanted this as a base 10 power instead of the default base 2 power for some reason.)

Re:Two megs?

[slackmaster2000]

The whole world has moved on now that we've all figured out that our hard drives are going to be a tad bit smaller than we thought. Then again, the memory companies have helped to even things out. The last time I bought 1 gigabyte of RAM, I was pleasantly suprised to have received 73,741,824 extra bytes!

How about we all just pretend that we know what we're talking about when we say that our internet connection is "8 megs" or that our hard drive is "200 gigs" or that we have a "3 gig" processor. None of these statements are accurate, but we know what they mean and they're close enough for the sake of discussion.

There's nothing wrong with saying "mebibyte" or "gibibyte", aside from the potential for them to sound like a three year old trying to pronounce "megabyte" and "gigabyte." ... well, and the fact that every single time you try to throw them into a general discussion somebody is going to call you on it. Every time. Every single time. It's patently obvious nerdiness, and somebody will always jump on it, and people like us will jump into the fray.

Re:Two megs?

[illumin8]

I think the hard drive industry might disagree with you. Everyone says it's just a recent marketting gimmick to cheat people out of space, but every HD I have ever bought, since 20MB was "huge", was rated in decimal multiples.

Just because an industry has co-opted our terminology for data storage doesn't mean we need to play their game and change our terminology to be more "politically correct." In fact, I would argue that we've been talking about bytes, kilobytes, megabytes, and gigabytes a lot longer than they've been cheating consumers on storage, so we have more of a right to use the term "megabyte" than they do.

The day I start saying mebibytes will be a cold day in hell.

Re:Two megs?

[Lord Ender]

MEBIBYTES

Please, stop this.

No, you stop this. Who the hell are you to redefine kilo to mean 2^10? It has ALWAYS meant 10^3--since long before there existed a word which meant 2^10. Now we have a word which means 1024 (kibi) and we still have a word that means 1000 (kilo), so we can stop all this ambiguous bullshit and just use precise, clear terminology.

So PLEASE, stop trying to redefine kilo to mean 1024!