My New TV Runs Linux
rca
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Monday 07 January 2008
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Oh yes, I broke down and bought a Full HD TV. What can you do,
they’re practically giving them away after the Christmas price hike.
And I have other excuses! Old set? A 16 inch one. Plus, I had plans to
hook up a PC and watch HD content. Can’t very well do that on an SD TV.
The new one is a Sharp LC-37X20E. I know it has red push and I know
this has to be corrected either in the signal source or via the service
menu, but once you do that, it’s an excellent set with good black
levels, fast response and the ability to show a great amount of detail.
I’m happy.
It does come with an extra feature though: it runs Linux. When
reading through the manual, one of the last pages includes a references
to the GPL and the LGPL, and it lists libpng, zlib, the Linux kernel
etc. as being included inside your TV. Sharp provides the source at this website.
This is a fantastic first step! Sharp sells hundreds of thousands of
LCD TVs each year, and they all run Free Software. Sharp is not alone:
I haven’t done a formal survey, but I hear that using Linux as kernel
and some GNU utilities or busybox is becoming the norm with flat-screen
television makers. It makes sense for everyone: They save billions of
dollars in R&D because they don’t have to develop their own kernel,
and the customer gains the stability and features Linux can provide.
It’s certainly win-win.
Now I’m not all happy with the way Sharp is treating this. They are
currently making the typical “Free Software newbie” mistake of just
dumping their source somewhere on a website and leaving it at that.
This makes me believe Sharp is primarily in this game because of the
financial benefits they are gaining, not because of any social
interests. In an ideal situation, Sharp would have set up a svn server
or something where people can contribute changes and then roll out the
firmware to new TVs. They do state somewhere that they will review and
accept user modificiations, but the way their GPL website looks — it
just doesn’t smell right yet.
I’m confident that companies like Sharp will become good players in
the Free Software community over time, though. This is not something
you can learn in just a few weeks, it takes an ideological shift on
many levels of the company, and anyone who has ever worked for
something medium-to-large knows how long this may take. At any rate:
Thank you, Sharp, for choosing Free Software for my TV. I have it
hooked up to an old PC I don’t need anymore. With GNU/Linux, it runs
movies at 1920×1080 on that TV without breaking a sweat. It’s yummy to
behold what a 100% Free Software stack can do nowadays in terms of
media.
