Beijing, Taipei, & Hong Kong — (press release excerpt) — TUXIA today announced the signing of a memorandum of understanding with Beijing Orient Electronics Group Co. (BOE), a leading manufacturer of electronics components and display devices, to co-develop embedded Linux software solutions to run Internet appliances in Greater China. The agreement positions TUXIA and BOE to leverage their complementary technologies to tap an emerging market in China for a new generation of Linux-based information appliances, such as thin client terminals, LCD Pad, WebPADs, set-top boxes, and PDAs.

The market for these products has grown rapidly in China, with the market for wireless handheld Internet devices having increased by 300 percent in the past two years, according to the Ministry of Information in China. China's Market Intelligence Centre further projects that in the next two years this market will increase by another 100 percent, and that 15 percent of Internet users will use these devices for Web access. The sales volume in China is expected to be 6,000,000 sets in 2001, and over 10,000,000 sets in 2002. Worldwide, research firm IDC forecasts that the global market for information appliances will grow to more than 89 million units, or $17.8 billion, in 2004, up from a market of 11 million units and $2.4 billion in 1999.

TUXIA's TASTE (TUXIA Appliance Synthesis Technology) is an embedded Linux software suite based on the current Linux Kernel 2.4 that consists of an embedded operating system, a Mozilla browser, and a full complement of plug-ins and other functionalities that are configured according to the use of an Internet appliance. Unique features of TASTE include a comprehensive terminal emulation suite, remote administration and configuration management, “crash-proof” RAM-based software design, short boot-up time, and a robust field upgrade mechanism. Through the use of block compression technology, TASTE is able to fit in a very small memory footprint, which yields dramatic savings for device manufacturers.

 
This article was originally published on LinuxDevices.com and has been donated to the open source community by QuinStreet Inc. Please visit LinuxToday.com for up-to-date news and articles about Linux and open source.