Odd Linux devices

Recently I was listening to a very interesting talk on dotnetrocks - it was an interview with Miguel de Icaza. You may remember that Lugradio recently interviewed him and you can listen to the dotnetrocks interview here. Anyway, its a very interesting interview and well worth a listen

Towards the end of the show they start talking about "toys" and they come up with a couple of Linux based devices that I wasn't aware of. The first is the Dal lamp - its apparently "The first living, intelligent and connected lamp". This is basically a lamp that changes colour and its connected via Wifi to your network - an it runs Linux ! This has to be one of the oddest uses of Linux I've seen to date :-)

The other thing that they mentioned was the work that Seattle Wireless are doing with the Linksys Wrt54g. I had totally forgotten about this. The Linksys Wrt54g is a pretty standard wireless broadband router, in that it has five ports at the back, one is labeled WAN (you plug the interweb cable in here) and the other four are for you to plug internal client machines into - like a 4 port switch if you like.

What a lot of people don't realise about this device is that it runs Linux ! Yes, that's right. This opens many possibilities up to the enterprising geeks out there. For example, these five ports don't have to be 1 x wan and 4 x internal. You could (as they suggest on the show) make another one of the ports a WAN port, if you have two internet providers, and do some funky load balancing on there. This is awesome, when you consider the cost of this device and the cost of the equivalent enterprise kit needed to do this.

This just one thing you could do with it, there are many others. Of course it does mean that you have to blow away the firmware and replace it with something else, but nothing ventured and all that !

I've been considering upgrading my 11mb wireless box and this may well be the answer.