Tux is alive!

[mdlbear]

In the expo here at OSCon there is a booth with a cute little animated penguin toy. It's sort of like the Nabaztag wi-fi rabbit, except that it can do a lot more (open and close its beak, flap its wings, spin around, talk using text-to-speech, ...), costs quite a bit less, and all the software is open source. The company website is kyosh.com; there's also a user/community website at tuxisalive.com. The bottom of the box lists "fully Linux-compatible PC" under system requirements. How cool is that?

Yeah, I bought one. Darned near bought one for one of the kids, but I didn't think either of them wanted to learn to program it. I'll happily be proved wrong, though. Probably just as well; it's going to be tight in the suitcase with just one.

Comments

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

Oh, jeez. :) Tempting. How much did they want in bucks?

[sdorn.livejournal.com]

The website says 79 euros.

[mdlbear]

With the convention discount it was e69; somewhere around $89 US.

[sdorn.livejournal.com]

So it'll be approximately half the cost of an XO, but they can talk to each other?

[mdlbear]

Well, it's not nearly as capable as an XO. It's running a very stripped-down OS; not sure how much it can do on its own. Definitely doesn't have the mesh networking that the XO has, though it might be possible to add it.

[eleccham.livejournal.com]

My first thought was, "It's Mr. Apple Head come alive!" (Mr. Apple Head was a program for the Apple ][ written by m_grey that made fairly wide distribution that would let you write scripts to change the title character's facial expressions. It was apparently long enough ago that I can't find a single reference to it online.)

My second thought was, "It's certainly less messy than Linux on a dead badger."