News Asus agrees to publish full Eee PC source code

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2007/11/29/asus_agrees_to_publish_full_eee_pc_source_code/1

After critics damned Asus for not following ths GPL agreement with the Xantros distro on the Eee PC, Asus has come back by admitting the error.

 

but we dont want the source code compiled

i didnt think it was intentional on asus' part and it seems it wasnt, but we will never know whether some companies 'play' at respecting the GPL or actually work with it. It would probably help to make their products better...

 

heh, yeah - "compiling the full source code" is a bit of a misleading turn of phrase!

 

If they bring out the 8GB version, then I'm there! (Well, work is, as they'll be paying for it )

 

Interesting to know, but personally I care far more about the stock shortages than I do about the GPL stuff.

 

The good news is they'll have the gpl folks off their back and they'll (hopefully) continue to make the linux version even after the XP version comes out. My biggest worry with this wasn't the non compliance as such but that this and other companies would think that making linux based products was too much hassle and not bother.

 

Phew, I'm not the only one geeky enough to be confused by that one!



Error: ";" Expected.

 

I'm curious about something: is it possible to run the Eee PC Linux Distro on a regular PC?

EDIT: From the Eee site:

Cool...

 

From what i was reading earlier in the week, the interseting part of the eee pc isn't open source. The ASUSLauncher the part which isn't a KDE desktop seems to be proprietary, which is real shame i had some plans for that.

 

Icy EyeG: i dont know about the asus 'easy' mode, it seems to be IceWM with an interesting theme, but the distro is basically Xandros, which in turn is built off Debian.

I suppose you could install a version of linux with IceWM as the window manager and copy over the 'themey bits' from the EEE PC to see if it works, it would be interesting to do, but on a regular PC, but with the added real estate of a fairly high resolution monitor, a standard KDE or Gnome desktop would probably be easier, once shortcuts and the like had been set up.

The EEE PC platform will probably be QT or GTK+ programs with some extra bits to make it integrate into IceWM more easily. I hope it might be a little more than that. If it was done well enough, it could possibly inspire younger people to write a few programs and make some new open source contributions at the same time.

 

It does look lice IceWM, but I don't think that's the case...

EDIT: According to wikipedia is KDE.

 

I'm waiting for someone to actually do something useful with this code that's been so hotly demanded.

Linux really is much more about political pointmaking than practical computing.

Phil

 

@Phil

The useful thing that people will do straight away is to allow the use of the full hardware under other linux distributions. Further to this I imagine the next step would be to customise a more up to date distro like Ubuntu with Asus tweaks that make this system fast to boot plus add the Easy desktop mode to thise distro probably with an easy way to switch to a real desktop.

 

The reason it was so "hotly demanded" is because they broke the law. They broke the terms of the license which they published the software under, unlike big brother at Redmond this has be happly sorted out with out resorting to lawyers. Do you honestly believe if Asus sold this with an unlicensed copy of Vista this would have gone away so quickly. If you honestly beilve linux is more about political points then i invite you to try it. Sure it doesn't game so well but then thats hardly "practical computing" is it.

 

I'm a Windows (dependent) user and a casual Linux user (I use Xubuntu on VMware Player and on an old pc), but I do consider (nowadays) Linux as practical computing. Ubuntu 7.10 is a good example of it IMHO.

 

i also consider Linux as a a practical computing experience, especially the latest builds that run just as good as XP and look very nice.... and with synaptics i can get lots of software fast and easy, as long as i have nice repositories.

edit: it is nice of ASUS to publish the source code and not go to court or do something bad.

 

ubuntu 7.10 is the worst Ver of ubuntu ever made stick with 7.04, never seen so many problems on the ubuntu forums as i keep up with each rels

if you do upgrade (back up \home as it probably will fail the upgrade) or planning on installing 7.10 make sure the network cable is unplugged so the set up does not fail (you need to turn the repositories back on after install as the setup turns them off)

 

It swings in roundabouts

Once you have installed 7.10 (with or without issues) a lot of the features seem very much improved
But whatever, its still early days for 7.10 and 7.04 does what I want .....

 

You want things to never change, stick with the mother of most distros... Debian, specifically Debian stable: Etch. The last Stable release didn't change for a number of years.

 

the "easy" mode is IceWM, but it does run KDE if you want a full desktop, so i assume both are installed.

there is some good information here: http://arstechnica.com/reviews/hardware/eee-pc-review.ars