Please note - Ndiyo has now officially closed its doors, at least as a legal entity - but we've kept the site alive in case any of the information is useful to others.
Our thanks to all those who helped out and were involved in so many different ways! The Ndiyo legacy lives on in the ultra-thin-client work at its spin-off DisplayLink, at Plugable, at NoPC and elsewhere...
Hubster - A New Kind of Terminal
We think this could represent a whole new way of adding extra users to a PC. One with some limitations, but also with many benefits. We have it working only in a very early prototype form at present, but we couldn't wait to tell people about the concept, which goes like this...
Imagine that you have a PC running a multi-user operating system such as Linux.
You plug a USB hub into it:
Using an adaptor such as a USB Nivo, you connect up a display:
"Aha!", says the PC. "That's
interesting. I have an extra display."
Then you plug in a keyboard and mouse, and the PC says, "That's enough to make a terminal!" And it creates up a new, independent, session with its own login prompt, and attaches that screen, keyboard and mouse to it:
Two users can now use that one PC.
Our software can explore the hierarchy of the USB connections, work out which components are connected to which hubs, and automatically make intelligent decisions about how to group them into terminals.
Let's plug in a few more devices to make another terminal:
On the fly, we have turned our single-user machine into a three-user machine, without any knowledge of network protocols, thin-client configurations, or terminal-server software! And we could add several more users in the same way.
But that's not all...