SplashTop is an instant-on Linux environment created by DeviceVM. SplashTop does not intend to provide a full computing environment, but it satisfies a home user's basic needs such as email, VOIP, IM, etc. Asus is the primary partner of DeviceVM and SplashTop started to get bundled with Asus motherboards and Asus notebooks. Now the good folks over at the Phoronix Forums have hacked SplashTop to run from a USB stick on non-Asus motherboards, run custom applications and launch a terminal inside the Linux environment.
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Member since:2005-07-06
Member since:2005-07-24
Those people should be shamed unmercifully. (For their own good. Most of us do not realize the damage we are doing.) There is no reason to leave a 150 watt PC on 24/7. I used to do it... until I realized that I was wasting over 1300 kilowatt hours per year by leaving the thing on for only 8 extra hours per day. (By comparison, the average modern fridge uses about 500 KWH per year.) Now I set it to power off the flat panel in six minutes and suspend the mid-tower in 20.
Do the math. See how much electricity you are actually wasting.
Edited 2008-07-31 01:11 UTC
Member since:2005-11-13
Member since:2006-01-19
Well, for most people who pay 10 cents/kWh this just means 130 $/year, so no big deal.
By the way, I got myself a fanless VIA mini-ITX board, plugged a flash "hard drive" into the IDE interface and installed a standard Debian distro on it.
It consumes 22 W, that results into 192 kWh/year, as I am paying a company which produces electricity from 100% renewable sources I pay 0.22 EUR/kWh, so this costs me 42 EUR per year. Something which is worth the comfort of having a router I can control by 100%, even the software on it. And who knows, I might some day start using it as internet radio reciever.
My next computer will be a laptop, so the power consumption will be a lot lower anyway than with my 5 year old 170 W Athlon setup (which does not run 24/7 of course). I even think about buying another fanless ITX board for office stuff and playing Wesnoth, which makes up most of my computer use anyway.
Member since:2005-08-18
Member since:
2005-11-13
[quote]If it is still instant-on (boots in 5 secs), then that's a big deal.[/quote]
Is it even possible to update this thing somehow, or is there a way to save anything, such that I could install extensions (like Adblock Plus) for Firefox?
If not, the usefulness of this is somewhat limited, as most people leave their PC on 24/7 anyway. Plus, the applications (esp the browser) are going to become very outdated over time. For example, when I first got the PC I'm currently using, Firefox didn't even exist
Edited 2008-07-30 16:06 UTC