Taipei (Taiwan) – Asus has partnered up with Device VM to produce millions of motherboards with almost instant on technology.  Using a Linux-based operating system stored in flash memory, the motherboards will be able to turn on and access common features like Internet and Voice over IP in few seconds.

Asus is rebranding Device VM’s Splashtop operating system into ‘Express Gate’ and will be including it on four mothberboard lines: P5Q Deluxe, P5Q-WS, P5Q3 Deluxe and the P5Q-E.  The company had included Express Gate in some of its high-end motherboards back on October 2007.  There are also plans on including the technology on all of Asus’ motherboards at an unspecified time in the future.

Joe Hsieh, Asus General Manager of the Motherboard Business unit says, “In response to great user feedback, our plan is to proliferate Express Gate across our entire motherboard product portfolio, starting with over one million motherboards per month.”

The Splashtop/Express Gate operating system is a light-weight embedded Linux platform that contains common applications like the Firefox browser and Skype voice client.  It typically boots in approximately five to fifteen seconds and gives an option to boot into the regular hard drive-installed operation system (this would usually be Windows).

Since Asus sells most of their boards to system builders, it’s going to be up to those companies to take advantage of the Express Gate feature.  Hopefully most of them will leave it alone for customers to tinker with, but we can see some companies hiding the OS – perhaps at the gentle urging of some really big company in Redmond, Washington.

awesome dude ...

May 15, 2008 11:01     

awesome dude
voltagefreak report abuse vote down vote up Votes: -1

Light and fast is the way to go

May 16, 2008 00:23     

You can bet they'll integrate more and more functionality into this light OS so people will have less and less reason to boot the bloated one on the hard drive. Asus is really showing off what can be done with Linux. There's some awesome innovation going on here.
Patrick report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +2

re: Light and fast is the way to go

May 16, 2008 05:12     

"they'll integrate more and more functionality into the light OS" doesn't that kind of make it not-so-light...?
Area51 report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +0

Sounds good!

May 16, 2008 05:43     

I can't wait 'til DFI does this. :)
Big Dong report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +0

re: Light and fast is the way to go

May 16, 2008 09:17     

>"they'll integrate more and more functionality into the light OS" > >doesn't that kind of make it not-so-light...? True. But if you consider that Vista uses about 6GB for a clean install with hardly any applications, and something like Puppy Linux can pack OS plus a range of useful apps into 100MB, you can see that you can do a lot and still be light and fast.
Patrick report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +3

Brilliant

May 16, 2008 10:35     

This is truly a brilliant innovation. It brings me back to the days of my commodore 64 when I could just turn it on and have it ready for instant use. Nowadays you turn on your computer and go get a snack or do the laundry while you wait for it to come up. Hopefully this kind of innovation will push MS to slim down their OS to make it boot in a reasonable amount of time.
Task report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +2