SplashTop Hacked, Functions on Non-ASUS Motherboards

When Splashtop was first released with a few ASUS motherboards last fall, I for some reason became interested immediately. Part of the reason might be attributed to the fact that I’m a Linux user to begin with, the other reason might be thanks to its uniqueness. Whatever it was though, might have been for good reason, as the technology has progressed quite a bit since then.

Well it seems like I wasn’t the only one who enjoys the technology, as some hackers on the Phoronix forums have found a way to milk the OS off of an ASUS motherboard and run it on others. It of course won’t be run off a flash chip embedded onto the motherboard, like the real technology, but it can be installed or accessed via a virtual machine, if it suits your fancy.

What’s the point of it all? Who knows, as more robust distros already offer ways to be run off of thumb drives. That’s not what’s important, though. There’s a good chance that the folks at DeviceVM are not jumping for joy all over this one, but cheers to the folks who made this happen.

Credit: Phoronix

One of the developers that has been working on compromising SplashTop has been Kano, a Debian developer and the leader of the Kanotix distribution. Kano has written scripts (available from the forums) that will then extract the SplashTop files, properly format a USB flash device for booting, and then install the needed files to the flash media.