ASUS releases Eee SDK, open source continues to be open
By Joshua Topolsky 
posted Mar 26th 2008 11:03AM
posted Mar 26th 2008 11:03AM
[Via Eee Site]
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having an sdk would still be useful. perhaps not all developers have a Linux install, and even if they do having all of the correct libraries and versions of everything all conveniently bundled up together sure does make things much easier.
i just wanna play Crysis on it.
You know what? I'm going to call you a noob.
Get ready... Here it comes!
You're a- wait; now that I think about it, Crysis running on an Eee would be pretty cool...
Oooh that would be nice.
I still haven'e managed to get TA up and running on mine yet.
Hopefully someone out there has the info/brains/geekiness to sort out a proper graphics driver for it. i'm running a modified intel driver and i can't get the touchscreen to wake up after standby.
tempting to get the sdk down just for the experience. -- I'll probably kill me eee though
And then...on a 800x448 screen (or something like that) Crysis would play well with just a low ranked video card :D
Only Zeus.:God's opinions matter! Hes the kind of person who hacks in call of duty 4 and still thinks he is good at the game. lol.
I decided to grab it just to see what's in it. Turns out their servers are *slow*. Of their 5 servers (US, Europe, China, Japan, and "Global"), the best speed I could get was something like 30KB/s, which means it'd take over a day to pull down that 1.2GB. These guys need to invest in some Amazon S3.
Torrent would also be a good solution considering that many Linux Distros are also released that way.
Wouldn't help me; I'm stuck on Comcast.
use the RC4 encryption option thru Azureus
@phanbouy: Thanks, that worked.
OK, I've got it (the server sped up after 5:00 or so). It's an RAR file which contains an ISO image. (I'm not sure why they didn't just ship the ISO itself; putting it into RAR saved a whopping 17M, or 1.3%, and RAR support isn't easy to find on Linux. Zip would've been OK.) And, yeah, the ISO image is a LiveCD of Xandros, including some development tools (e.g., gcc, Eclipse, the Linux kernel source, QT Designer). Oh, and unrar, which is getting pretty recursive.
I haven't booted it yet, though; it's late, and I don't feel like rebooting my machine. I'll feed it to qemu in the morning.
OK, I've got it running, and, yeah, it's just a stock Xandros distribution with a few development tools and a 48-page PDF on developing for the Eee. They didn't even bother to add icons for the development tools to the desktop or the panel; they're buried in the menus as if this were a general-purpose distro.
I wonder if they realize that distributing Xandros means they're obligated to provide source for all its GPL components?
Do you have to buy an EEE pc to use the SDK?
I don't get this. Is this just a Xandros installation image for desktops bundled with eclipse?
It's probably just a rar'ed tarball of the sources to stay GPL compliant.
A little off topic, but anybody know where I can get a LCD screen that small with a VGA connector that doesn't cost me an arm and a leg (everything I have found with google costs an arm and a leg because people want them in their cars). It's for a robotics project, so please help a brother-nerd out!
Get an EeePC....
@Stevo
The LCD screen on the EeePC -- and every other device with an integrated LCD screen -- doesn't have a VGA connector...
The only VGA connector available is an *output* from the integrated video card.
The Sony "official" PSOne LCD screen can be wired for a VGA connector (needs composite sync input) with no extra circuitry, they aren't terribly expensive if you go through ebay or similar.
@Stevo:
While I appreciate your attempt to help me, a quick search will reveal that the Eee is more expensive then a 7" standalone VGA controller & connector-equipped monitor, which they themselves are more expensive then standalone 19" VGA controller and connector-equipped monitors.
And then there is the teensy tiny problem of: is the VGA controller mounted onto the MB, or does it sit behind the screen... a serious question because having to diconnect the screen from the lappie portion might give me just a LCD panel with no controller (7" LCD panel *alone* price: around $11 wholesale). To which I would then have to add a controller and a VGA port... the former is no small electronics feat.
Doesn't every major Linux distribution include a full development environment for almost every programming language in existence? It may not be installed by default, but getting it is trivial. On Fedora, for example:
yum groupinstall "Development Tools"
This seems like a PR thing to me, a "Me Too!" for journalists that really can't get their heads around the whole Linux thing.
Only waiting for 3G broadband.
@JB87:
Thanks, Ive been looking at portable gaming screens (Intec, Mojoplay, etc) as well... they all have pretty crappy image quality, but their cheap. I was not aware you could go VGA --> composite/s-video(?) W/o a graphics card that already has such outputs, of course(?) I thought I would need a source converter, which would be too bulky.
You can't do direct vga -> composite/s-video, but that specific screen has pins on the circuit board that can be wired to a vga connector. It's popular with homebrewers apparently, I've seen it modded into several PC cases.
If I recall correctly, the Xandros distro is open source. However, there are some bundled apps that aren't open source, such as the voice command. That was a fantastic little app, but without an SDK or source, it's not really possible to work with it.
Even still, the EeePC has a very small form factor for a full fledged PC, and I know of quite a few apps that don't play nice with the screen. If an SDK makes for easy gui apps that properly work with the small screen, I'd call that a win.
Well, given that ASUS has been terrible so far in producing stable updates and patches and in creating any sort of a useful repo of software (thus requiring eeePC users to hack their OS so that they can get into other repos - and then pray the software doesn't brick their device), 'opening up' their OS to software developers can't be a bad thing.
Rather like Apple and their iPhone/Touch - why build useful software when the user will pick up our devices with any old crap on them anyway.....