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I have known about the openbios / linuxbios project for a little while now, but today I discovered a video demonstrating an early build running on a standard 2Mb flash EEPROM. Not only does it completely replace the standard Award BIOS but it boots to a graphical (if lightweight) X11 server in just a few seconds. Although this project is still fairly new (shown by limited compatibility) the concept of having a unified, free bios that allows fast prebooting into a graphical environment is appealing. I believe Macs do something similar, they boot into a very stripped down GUI giving graphical boot options. This idea is not new and ASUS demonstrated a couple of weeks back a motherboard that has an embedded linux distribution ready to boot before windows. The technology is called Splashtop and allows access to email, skype and the web from a stripped down linux environment.

More and more I am seeing a trend towards 'at-an-arms-length' computing and I have mixed feelings about it. Whilst linuxbios would allow better / more efficient booting into a Linux (or other OS) distribution, having a stripped down environment where you could then VNC or telnet into another more powerful system is an interesting idea with lots of potential applications. Imagine a media center PC that was fast (as in instant) to boot and silent due to all the processing being done on another machine on the network, it would be an ideal mediacenter environment. Similarly there is a low murmuring that has been increasing in volume for the last few years concerning a complete shake up of the traditional computing environment. It essentially started with web '2.0' i.e. applications as a service. The whole idea of being able to log into a personalised environment in a web browser is an appealing one, be it a web operating system like eyeOS or just a social networking environment like Facebook. Not only can you have access to your personal space/files/environment remotely, but instead of buying a powerful machine and maintaining its software and hardware, buying a thin client and computing entirely online. Many people simply do not have the technical expertise or the time to properly maintain their home computers. Simple tasks such as regular defragmentations or temporary file cleanup and data archiving often are not done regularly. Many computers I see do not even have basic security programs running. A secure thin client running on a whitelist basis would not need such constant attention and any security would be handled remotely by the application provider. Potentially providers could offer really cheap, low power machines with a monthly payment, which would serve as a lease for an online operating system and storage space.

Although there are potentially a lot of benefits, there is something about relying entirely on a network that is outside your control, (the Internet) a service provider that could have a dubious privacy policy (look at AT&T) and a locked down client which does not appeal to me. I have very much bought into the F/OSS philosophy and the concept of being locked into a proprietary system does not appeal at all, let alone relying on a foreign (i.e. outside my home system) network - especially with my ISP's service record.

The Playstation 3 was recently released and this platform has made quite a significant impact to the overall processing power at the disposal of the project teams. Infact, it would seem I greatly underestimated the overall contribution the PS3 client has made. At the time of writing, the combined power of a quarter of a million PS3s is generating almost SIX (5.77x) times the power of ~200,000 desktop computers (x86 and PPC architectures across OS/X Windows and Linux flavors.) It appears that in the last few months the project broke a Petaflop(?) of total distributed processing power, having ~740 Teraflops in mid march as reported by Techreport. To see the current stats broken down by machine type and architecture go here. I have also re-uploaded the themes on the Geexbox page. If I get a moment I will make some more soon, if anyone wants free hosting for their theme please feel free to contact me.