http://www.theregister.co.uk/000120-000004.html:
Transmeta Linux flavour smoked out
Curiously under-reported yesterday was exactly which flavour of Linux
forms the core of Transmetas embedded Mobile Linux. This comes as part
of the package for its offering to would be OEMs of Internet
appliances.
Recall that of the two chips, the little one - the single-watt TM3120
is being shipped with a stripped down distro in 32MB, which Torvalds
said amounts to roughly 64MB of code at current compression rates.
Enough to run Netscape, and the usability gizmos added Transmeta such
as a pop-up keyboard and support for Palm's Graffiti.
Given Linus professional impartiality towards the distros he helped
spawn he often cites choosing Transmeta as confirmation of this we
think a little odd no one thought to find out yesterday.
But rest assured folks, we've smoked it out.
And the winner is Debian. But if youre a stockholder of Red Hat, don't
send your class action seersucker to the dry cleaners just yet. Being
Open Sourcetm natch, Red Hat wouldn't have seen a penny under the
usual licensing conditions, and of course the collection of Transmeta
add-ons which includes power management too gets released right back
into the open source code cloud.
Torvalds also ruled out the prospect of this package evolving into any
kind of Transmeta distro. A nice Transmeta chap also intimated that
the choice of distro had been the subject of fierce debate: "carpet"
and "blood" weren't mentioned explicitly, but we kinda get the
picture.
And it's really rather sweet. Not only is this a vote of confidence in
Debian its as near to being sanctified as a distro can get but it
might close the gap between the high technical regard in which Debian
is held, and the general punters ignorance of its existence.
And isn't it touching that the blessing should go to the only
distribution which is incapable of making its authors obnoxious,
millionaired IPO'd superbrats? Debian is a collective organisation,
not a private company. Don't even bother looking for the ticker. R
--
Rafael Laboissière <rafael@???>
