SplashTop Source Code Released

It was a month ago that we first looked at SplashTop on the ASUS P5E3 Deluxe motherboard and found this to be a very exciting and forthcoming technology. If you missed our earlier article, SplashTop is an instant-on Linux desktop environment. Within a matter of seconds after turning on the motherboard -- and without using a hard drive -- you're able to access a Firefox-based web browser and the Skype VoIP client. As we shared in a later update, SplashTop will also be shipping on desktops and notebooks next year. While the only motherboard to integrate SplashTop right now is the ASUS P5E3 Deluxe, the SplashTop source code has been released as of this morning. A SplashTop SDK is in the works, but for now, the GPL code is available.

To access this source code you must go to this page on their website and fill out a form that contains very basic information and then they will automatically email you the download link. The SplashTop source package is currently 11.6MB without the SDK. Right now, this package provides dvm-dist-20071019, which consists of core and appliance portions. The appliance portion contains BlackBox 0.70.1 with BBKeys and BBDock. The other part of the appliance portion is SCIM 1.4.7 with its related components.

Unfortunately, with this early source-code the core is not actually the SplashTop core but just six kernel patches. These patches are for Bootsplash, DVM, getting the CMOS time, adjusting the max loop, the sk98lin networking driver, and SquashFS. Presently, the Linux kernel that SplashTop uses is Linux 2.6.20.11.

That's it for the SplashTop GPL source code right now. There isn't much to get excited over with today's source-code release but hopefully that will change once the SplashTop SDK is available.