Linked by Eugenia Loli-Queru on Tue 29th Nov 2005 19:41 UTC
Geeks.com sent us for a review an external hard drive enclosure case, the "TVisto Series 3.5" Multimedia HDD Enclosure" (2.5" series also available). But this is not just another hard drive enclosure, but also a multimedia jukebox. And it's running uCLinux, an embedded version of Linux.
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Member since:
2005-06-28
For a commercial company, it does make sense of sense actually. Points:
1. MacPower, the manufacturer, doesn't necessarily develops the firmware too. In this case, they don't have developers on board to "force" their marketing/sales dept to support Linux as a desktop platform for it.
2. Most Linux distributions don't mount automatically and give the right RW permissions to normal users. This is a major support headache for all similar companies. They simply don't want to deal with it (and I personally would do the same, support people cost too much).
3. Formatting the disk (which is required the first time you put a new drive in it) under Linux is also not a "right-click affair". Again, support costs.
4. The recommended file system to format the drive with is NTFS. Many Linux distros don't come with NTFS pre-installed because of patent issues, so users would have to use either FAT32 (which is problematic with filesizes over 4GB) or HFS+ (which Windows doesn't support -- no other file systems are supported by the firmware).