For a long time I didn’t wrote something in my blog. This happens from time to time to a lot of people I think… 🙂
Ok, so some interesting news on the FreeBSD front: I’m porting NMM (version 1.0.0).Back in the days when I was writting my diploma thesis, those people where working on it already. I always wanted to port it, as it was cool to see it in action (one system picked up a football match and distributed it to a lot of PCs in the local subnet (AFAIR multicast) and even handhelds in real-time (with automatic downsizing to the output device), and was also distributing it to the Uni-Aula (AFAIR TCP stream)). The box was not powerful at all, and you where able to do a lot of processing on any machine in the network, while the client didn’t know where which processing happened. They also present it for several years on the CEBIT in Germany. They have videos showing it in action. You can do a lot more cool things with this. Think about a network aware multimedia center. You can have your movies / MP3s / whatever on several machines in your network, and the output is displayed on a not so powerful machine without any trace in the GUI that there are other machines involved. And if you want to play around, you can even see/hear the same stuff synchronized at the same time in multiple rooms and even on your handheld device.
This is scheduled to be used in the new KDE multimedia infrastructure, and even in some Bang&Olufsen products.
So far it compiles after a little bit of patching, but there are some strange things to solve before I can even try to use it. I posted a message to the development forum, let’s wait and see what they have to tell.
And on a related area, I also got a Wiimote (Wii remote controller) working in FreeBSD. I think this will be a nice mouse replacement for a multimedia center. I have a discussion on the FreeBSD bluetooth mailinglist regarding this.