BlackDog Linux Personal Server
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I stopped by the BlackDog booth at Linux World today, initially drawn in by the spectacle of Tux the Linux Penguin riding on BlackDog’s mechanical bull. Not something you see every day.
The whole scene at the BlackDog booth had sort of a early dot-com boom circa 1996 feel to it. Here’s a company I’ve never heard of, with a relatively huge booth and lots of happy staffers recruiting riders for the mechanical bull, but almost no one bothering to mention what they were actually selling, other than large posters announcing “The World’s First Linux Server that will take You for a walk”. It took me a bit of effort to find a person who could explain what they were selling.
The BlackDog server turns out to be an interesting hybrid of a putting Linux on a USB flash device and putting an embedded Linux into a USB device. The actual device is around the size and weight of a pack of cards, and runs Debian Linux on a 400MHz PowerPC, drawing power from the USB interface. The announced ship date is September 1, 2005, at $199 for 256MB or $239 for a 512MB model. Both models include a fingerprint scanner, 64MB RAM, and a SD/MMC expansion slot.
Unlike the SoulPad, BlackDog is intended for use with a Windows or Linux system that’s already running. In their booth demo, when the device is plugged in, it launches an X server on the WinXP host system, which is then used as the display for applications residing on the BlackDog server.
A few considerations come to mind:
- Since there’s no network interface, this can’t be used as a Linux server in the typical sense, i.e. plugged into the network on its own. It could probably be connected to a powered USB hub for power and a network connection, but this doesn’t appear to be its design target.
- Fast startup time - in their booth demo, the environment hosted on the device came up a few seconds after plugging in the USB cable. I’m guessing that the WinXP autoplay was previously configured to run the X server from the USB flash file system on hotplug detection. In any case, it’s a lot faster than cold-booting Linux or Windows.
- Since it relies on the host computer for human interface (display, keyboard, and mouse), it’s not quite as secure as it might look. One issue I worry about in public internet cafes and other shared-computer environments is the growing presence of keyloggers. Spyware-infested public computers are fairly common in my unscientific poll (i.e. places I’ve stopped, mostly in Asia). So my working assumption is that anything I type on a public computer is visible. That would still apply to applications hosted on the BlackDog server, since it can’t do anything about securing the human interfaces on host system. This is one of the reasons I’m mostly considering bootable Linux environments for use in unsecured environments.
It seems like a neat gadget. I’ll have to think a bit more about what it’s actually good for.
The BlackDog team is apparently looking for ideas as well. They’re starting a developer contest in September when the product is shipped, with a $50,000 prize. A lot of money for a product that appears to be in the “interesting-linux-hacker-widget” category. I suspect the total product revenue for some products in this space are less than $50K.
Turns out they’re part of Realm Systems, which received $8.5 million in funding last January, which is why they can afford a huge booth that doesn’t tell anyone what they’re doing, and offer $50K for a developer contest.
Hint to Realm’s marcom team: The mechanical bull was a lot of fun, but it would be good to mention what you’re selling once in a while…
See also: SoulPad, Rabbit Ethernet, SSV Embedded, PicoTux, Engadget, discussion at Slashdot
Tags: linux, open source, hardware, embedded, usb, ubicomp
