Todays & Tomorrows Technology

Marvell’s SheevaPlug wall-wart Linux PC has finally come of age, with the company announcing mainstream retail partners including Buffalo, D-Link, LaCie and Seagate, together with beginning distribution of the Plug Computer development kit in Europe. The original SheevaPlug has a Marvell Kirkwood processor with a 1.2GHz Sheeva processor, 512MB of RAM and 512MB of flash storage; resembling a wall-wart, it plugs directly into a power socket and offers a single USB 2.0 port and a gigabit ethernet port. Suggested uses included a home server, NAS or other form of network-connected device.

Various companies have partnered with Marvell to offer Plug Computers in multiple form-factors. These range from Axentra, who have a new touch*mediacenter mini designed to store and share digital content, Eyecon Technologies, who are positioning their version as a multi-source UPnP/DLNA aggregator, and CodeLathe, whose TonidoPlug is a home server offering local and remote access to documents, apps and media. Ionics have taken a more general approach, positioning their Plug Computer as a tiny Linux PC, while ProSyst have integrated OSGI and Java to their version, to enable developers to more easily port existing apps and create new software. Finally, WebTView have loaded their own software to discover and play internet TV.

The various form-factors include a simple box that closely resembles the original SheevaPlug prototype, together with more streamlined and even circular designs. Of course, as well as the development device from Marvell themselves, the first retail device based on the reference design is already available, in the shape of the PogoPlug.

According to Marvell, a Plug Computer uses less than one tenth of the power of a regular home server PC. It supports multiple Linux 2.6 kernel distributions, and is available to developers now for $99.

Windows 7’s native support for multitouch is well known, but if Microsoft thought that would be another knife into Linux then they should prepare for disappointment. A French development group at ENAC have developed native multitouch using Linux 2.6.30, supporting the usual swipe, flip, rotate and pinch-resize gestures.


While multitouch can be baked into Linux using the MPX system integrated into X.Org server v7.5, which offers multiple independent pointers at the windowing system level, the ENAC version actually sends events from the OS kernel. The ENAC code is also more flexible, using general libraries so as to be usable in more Linux versions: co-developer Mohamed-Ikbel Boulabiar expects it to be included in Google’s Android stack.

The upshot of this is that netbooks, nettops and notebooks that have multitouch-capable touchscreens won’t be limited to Windows 7 for their functionality. Linux’s market share is already down to a small minority of netbook/nettop implementations, and analysts suggested that Windows 7’s arrival could have squeezed that even further. With native multitouch support, Linux could well fight back against that prediction.