Mario Behling @ NUS and an idea.

March 12th, 2009 · No Comments

I took some time out of my busy schedule to attend a talk by Mario Behling. The talk was organized by the people from LinuxNus. A short intro of Mario taken from the LinuxNus website:

Mario Behling is a FOSS advocate known in the international (Free and Open Source Software) FOSS community through his work for FOSS Bridge, Freifunk and LXDE. Mario, originally from Berlin, has lived in different countries in Asia, Europe and in Australia. He works with business and educational projects like the OLPC project in Afghanistan or FOSS Bridge in Vietnam, where he advises companies on open source business and internationalization strategies and organizes matchmaking events for SMEs. Mario was elected as the president of the LXDE Foundation in 2008. As an active community manager he promotes the LXDE community and coordinates the work of projects like the LXDE Translation Project. As part of his engagement in the free wireless freifunk community he maintains freifunk websites like the wiki (wiki.freifunk.net) and the global free wireless newswire (global.freifunk.net).

The talk was motivational and very inspirational. It is really amazing how people are able to take time out of their daily lives to contribute to the open source community as developers and even non-developer positions such as open source event organizers. I felt rather inspired, to the extent of wanting to develop a new distro (a long unfulfilled dream). Thus, I did a rather short thinking session on my walk home.

There’s a Linux distribution for almost any and every situation you can think of. From full-fledge application-heavy developer’s distros to a small operating system that can fit in your thumb drive. But I realized (maybe I might be wrong) that there isn’t actually a Linux operating system ditribution streamlined for “smart-home” embedded systems (then again, maybe there might not be a need for one). Hence, I began listing some functional and non-functional requirements for such an operating system.

Functional Requirements:

1. Able to communicate with any household interface through wired/wireless interfaces.
2. Handle a lot of unpredictive events (event triggered applications).
3. Nice touch-screen GUI.
4. Possible NAS-to-OS interface for storage/streaming of multimedia.
5. Ability to detect and prevent intrusions.
6. Will be connected to almost everything in the house (Fridge, kettle, TV, printers, multimedia box, consoles, etc).
7. Robust with very small context switching delays of tasks.
8. Small memory footprint. Lightweight and require < 4Gb space.
9. Good handle of I/O operations.
10. …..

Non-functional requirements:

1. Processor with excellent I/O capabilities (x86 compatible?).
2. Ethernet and Wifi (802.11 b/g/n) connections.
3. Touch screen (haptic).
4. Compatible with some smart home interface and standards (if any?).
5. …
6. …

Well, these are just the lists of requirements that came from the top of my mind while walking back home. It’ll definitely need refinements and research. Just imagine being able to control the temperature of your fridge from your office, stock-check your foodstuffs from school, record your favourite TV show from overseas, monitor your house remotely, switch on/off the lights or any connected electrical appliances for that matter from anywhere, VoIP from a remote location via your house phone and lots more! A geek heaven I must say!

Anyone keen to take on the challenge? haha.. Well, maybe after I hand in my Final Year Project. boo!