ASUS P5E3 Deluxe is a beast of a motherboard and based on the Intel X38 chipset. Even though just the X38 chipset is enough to make it interesting, ASUS has managed to do something different and very intuitive with this particular board. ASUS engineers have integrated Linux into the board. Within seconds from you start the board, you can be up and running a [re-branded] Firefox web browser surfing the web, chat through the included Skype client or simply sending a couple of e-mails. The technology has been dubbed ASUS Express Gate and is future-proof as it is upgradeable through Windows. It uses the SplashTop Linux distribution.
Over at Phoronix they’ve published an article that goes into some depth on the new system, but most of all has plenty of pictures of the SplashTop environment. To both ours and their great surprise SplashTop Linux offers surprising complexity and quite a lot of features, with more coming in future updates.
The SplashTop website has also gone live now that the X38 chipset and the P5E3 Deluxe has been officially unveiled, and there you can find a video and some general information about the embedded Linux environment from DeviceVM.
Don’t forget to check out the walkthrough over at Phoronix, which offers plenty of information on the new Express Gate feature and SplashTop.
