Tale of a Black Dog
By: Russell Pavlicek
Thursday, December 8, 2005 10:07:28 AM EST
URL: http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/reviews/6103/1/
A Different Type of Canine
During last August's LinuxWorld Expo, there was one bit of technology which managed to captivate me: a small innocuous box called a Black Dog. I thought to myself, "I've got to get a chance to play with one of these." Now, you might think that a house with four dogs, six cats, and five ferrets would have no room for another dog, but adding the Black Dog to the mix is a small affair. Unlike its four-footed counterparts, this Black Dog takes very little room and very little care.
What is a Black Dog? It's a complete USB-powered Linux server which fits easily in the palm of your hand (see Figure 1). Powered by a 400-MHz PowerPC processor, 64 MB of RAM, and either 256 MB or 512 MB of flash, this pint-sized pet packs quite a bite (or is that "byte"?). Add to that the built-in biometric scanner, MMC expansion slot, and USB V2.0 interface that acts as both its power source and conduit to the network, and you have quite a set of teeth on this little computing animal. And, perhaps most surprising of all, the device's price tag comes close to its size: just US$199 for the 256-MB unit or US$239 for the 512-MB version.
The concept is very different than what is most in use today: the Black Dog is a parasitic server that draws power and networking connectivity from the system to which it is attached, while using its host to provide access into the device. In this way, the owner does not just bring his own storage medium with him (in the case of a USB drive and similar items), but a complete computing environment. It's almost like having a laptop that fits easily in your shirt pocket.
This tiny beast is the brainchild of the folks at Realm Systems, who apparently see the Black Dog as the means, rather than the end, of a new product line. Poking around their website, I notice that they describe a product called the Realm Mobile Personal Server (MPS), which looks like what you may get when you cross a Black Dog with the needs of a corporate IT organization. It's a dog without the fleas which come along on the new pooch in town; one that is ready for use in the enterprise.
But how do you get from the Black Dog, which has the undeniable appeal a serious geek toy, to the IT-centric MPS unit? Simple: hold a contest to see which geeks can create or port the most interesting Open Source applications to the new device. The contest, which runs through January 15, 2006, features a US$50K bounty for the best app to be submitted by the deadline. A little cold, hard cash combined with the obvious geek-coolness of the task at hand should draw the attention of a number of Open Source techies who would like to see new and nifty things appear on the diminutive hound.
A Pretty Poochie Arrives
After seeing the device in action at LinuxWorld Conference and Expo, I quickly pre-ordered one after my return home. Shipping on the new device was set to begin around September 1, so I was anxiously waiting for the new pup to arrive. Production delays and a large number of pre-orders (guess I wasn't the only one impressed at LWCE) delayed shipment for almost a month, but that was understandable given that it was a totally new device.
Finally, the day came when the dark pooch arrived. Given that this device is apparently a production prototype of some future portable computing device, I fully expected the shipping carton to contain a simple, vanilla box holding the Dog, a CD with needed software, and maybe a sheet of information on installing the little beast. Much to my surprise, I discovered that the folks at Realm Systems had come up with a packaging system almost as clever as the device it held.
Opening the shipping carton revealed a bag styled after a sack of dog food, with the Black Dog logo on the front and verbiage exclaiming, "NOW with sample bytes of juicy CODE." The reverse side of the bag contains Ingredients ("Serving Size: Fits in your hand") (see Figure 2), Contents (the device specs), and an obligatory product warning ("Some engineers may have been harmed in the making of this product"), as well as information on the coding contest. Inside the bag is a small, black box that holds the beloved beast, graced with a black dog collar with steel spikes (see Figure 3). Quite an impressive presentation for such a quiet little product.
Difficulties in Paper Training
On the LWCE show floor, the Black Dog representative showed how the device could spring to life by simply plugging it into a Windows machine. Masquerading as a USB CDROM, the device would offer an autostart file which would activate a Cygnus X11 server and present a window into the mysterious little machine. Short, sweet, and simple.
Unfortunately (at least in the context of the Black Dog), Windows machines are in short supply around my house. And while a solution for using the tiny beast does exist under Linux, it is not nearly as clever. A fairly simple solution exists if you happen to be using Debian with a 2.6 kernel, but I am using a slightly old Mandrake (not even Mandriva) laptop with a 2.4 kernel engine. After a little research on the Black Dog forum on their website, I came up with the following sequence for walking the Dog:
xhost + # Insert Black Dog mount /dev/sr/c0b0t0u0 /mnt/tmp /mnt/tmp/linux/mps300.hotplug /mnt/tmp/linux-i386/realm_net /mnt/tmp
But, sadly, a problem developed. Barely 15 minutes into my experimentation, the Dog stopped barking. Upon insertion, it produced a solid green light from its carcass and nothing else. The laptop did not see a new device. The flashing lights on the case stopped flashing. My new Dog was dead.
I opened a trouble ticket on the Black Dog website. After a few suggestions from the gentleman providing support, I was notified that I would receive a new pup in the mail. It seemed that my unit had some defective firmware that kept it from starting up and even prevented it from being reinitialized and reloaded.
So, after a couple weeks, I received a new Black Dog in the mail, with instructions on how to return the defective one using a prepaid UPS call sticker and the new shipping carton. This was a strikingly good piece of customer service that I had not expected. I wish all warranty returns were that easy.
Getting Acquainted
With the new product in hand, I proceeded to once again start my testing. This time, thankfully, the new Dog responded as expected.
Starting up the Black Dog using the process mentioned above, I soon found that the little fella was somewhat devoid of personality out of the box. Yes, the biometric scanner automatically calibrates to your finger with a few presses of the thumb (that's quite a neat bit of technology on such a small device). But other capabilities are rather bland in its initial state.
The original pop-up menu contains just four items: Info, XGalaga, XBlast, and XTerm. Hardly a mind-blowing group of applications, this limited repertoire might seem seriously underwhelming if you were expecting the device to jump to life with an amazing array of programs.
On the server side of things, the Black Dog includes an Apache web server (currently containing one page with helpful links to the Black Dog Project website) and a Samba server ready to share the pooch's full 512-MB file system. And, of course, there are the usual assortment of basic command line utilities which lurk under the covers (see Figure 4).
What It Is... And Is Not
But this is, I believe, the beauty of the Black Dog project. It is not a finished oil portrait. Rather, it is the canvass and paint awaiting the strokes of a master painter. The Black Dog is less a "product" and more an effort is an attempt to foster development of software value to a novel new hardware device.
If you are looking for a finished product which will supplement your business's needs out of the box, consider waiting for the Realm Mobile Personal Server. If, however, you want a platform to explore the possibilities afforded by this new type of device, this may be just the item for you.
Unlike many miniature computing devices, the Black Dog is designed to be easily reconfigurable. Based on Debian for PowerPC, the Black Dog can apt-get a number of standard Linux applications which aren't normally loaded in the standard distribution. Given Realm's push toward creating an IT-savvy follow-on, this Dog's ability to learn new tricks is just the ticket.
The DVD-R included in the package contains the System Developer's Kit (SDK) for application developers. The Project Black Dog website also includes numerous pieces of documentation, the latest software downloads, and a helpful group of forums where people discuss issues relating to Black Dog. All in all, a good bit of information is ready at your fingertips for playing with your new pet.
But What Good Is It Really?
But the real question is: what is its killer app? What is the one function or application suite which will make it the indispensable IT tool for the rest of the decade? This is, essentially, the question which the user community will help answer.
Now, the cynic may view this as basically a solution in search of a problem and dismiss it out of hand, but that would be a mistake in my opinion. The Black Dog concept strikes me as a truly innovative design hitting the industry at a time when innovation is more a marketing buzz word than the mark of novel thinking. Frankly, I don't know what problem the Black Dog is best at solving; but I cannot escape the conclusion that the problem probably exists and that a final piece of innovation marrying the problem to the device will weld the dark canine's descendants to the IT industry for years to come. Certainly, a transportable compute environment has clear business value (just consider the omnipresence of laptops in business). Shrinking much of that capability into a device smaller than a deck of cards could easily become a winner of a concept in the business world.
In a lot of ways, asking what the Black Dog is good for reminds me of the discussions around what Linux was good for in the late 1990s. There was a crowd willing to dismiss Linux as a mere geek toy simply because it wasn't ready to handle the load at Fortune 100 companies under the 1.x kernel. However, the smarter money was betting that Linux would grow up to solve real IT problems.
Personally, I think there will be a slew of little black pups in the future of IT. Time will tell, but if you can think of a good role for this technology, consider hacking on one of these gizmos. You might even win some cold, hard cash if the results are good enough. And that ain't no dog chow.