Hi All, Over the last few years I have seen a few trends in hardware and software that made me curious about the possibility that soon it might be quite easily to put together an operating system and our own applications together as one physical piece of media, and distribute this as a self contained turn key system. I'm not on my own in considering this as there are now a few Linux Live CD's that are dedicated to running just a signal application - Myth TV + Linux distributions are probably the most obvious one today, but there even items like CAD apps now being distributed this way.
What makes this area of particular intererst to me is that some applications which can be treated as a turn key systems are games and simulators, these are of course bread and butter apps for scene graphs. For the turn key application developer I see and advantage in that you can control the whole software enviornment, taking you a step closer to the type of fixed system that a Console developer can work to. Or course PC hardware is far more varied than Console is, but thankfully OpenGL and a decent OS can hide much of these variants for causing us too much concern. What strikes me as madness right now is that you get games written with DirectX 9.0 implementation for Windows XP, DirectX 10.0 implementation for Windows Vistsa, and an OpenGL implementation for Linux and OSX is such ports are done - the madness is that all these versions of the software, all these different binary distribution that have to be created and tested all just target the same PC hardware, the only thing causing all this extra work is that there are just so many OS variants around. Alas its so much hardware to maintain all of these distributions that often games developers just target a single OS, so all the other OS users that have the same hardware are out of luck. Now if one bundles the OS + application together, placing it on a USB flash disk and boot from this disk then the actual OS installed on a PC becomes irrelevant, just take your key with you plugin it, boot the machine and there you have a PC hardware acting like a Console. With the cost of USB flash disks coming down it won't be too long before the cost of it won't be significant chunk of the cost of software. The same can be done for CD's and DVD's, performance isn't so stellar of course. If you do have a full blown turn key system then there is nothing stopping you from installing the Application System directly on the hard disk. There are technical hurdles with going for such approach, and is only really appropriate for certain classes of apps, but I'd guess that there are number of OSG users that might just fit this category quite nicely, or perhaps find it advantageous to have the ability to deliver their software in this way. Perhaps OSG users are already doing this, or are considering. The purpose of this email is to throw this possibility out there, and to get feedback from OSG users who might find such an means of distribution useful. There are members of the community far better placed to actual go ahead and implement such a system too so I'd be nice to hear from guys with more knowledge on the OS side. There are already tools for creating Live CD's, I haven't played with them yet, but perhaps in a few years I'll have time to... Perhaps even one day we'll been able to have a few pages on the OSG wiki about how to create your own OSG app Live CD/USB distribution ;-) Robert. _______________________________________________ osg-users mailing list osg-users@lists.openscenegraph.org http://lists.openscenegraph.org/listinfo.cgi/osg-users-openscenegraph.org
