Yes, I’m feeling prolific and verbose today, so you get two posts.
For my birthady, Jennifer decided to get me and MP3 player. Well…sort of… I kinda decided that I wanted one, and she said ok. That meant I got to pick out what I wanted. Jeremiah had informed me a few weeks ago of a new product that a company from overseas had created. It’s essentially one of those personal media devices that you can listen to music, watch videos, read e-books, etc… and yet this one is special. It’s a GP2x personal entertainment system.
What sets it apart from the other’s you might ask? Well, it runs on a Linux operating sytem of course! That’s was pretty much the selling point for me. This company has open sourced their kernel, drivers, etc.. so that developers can write programs for whatever they want this thing to do.
For a Linux developer it’s a pipe dream. Well, almost…. As I’m sure most of you don’t know, multimedia applications are not Linux’s strong suit. Not through and fault of Linux. The vendors who create multimedia are stupid and lazy and don’t like the freedom that Linux gives a user. I could rant on the philosopy of this for hours, but I’ll spare you. Back to the GP2X.
Actually, I’m not going to waste my time describing it. Go to the website and check it out. www.gp2x.com
Anyway, there are some caveats, but overall I really like it, it seems to work well, and I’m really looking forward to writing my own game that will run on it. Now, if only I could find the time to do that…..