More On Black Dog

Realm Systems is a small startup with about 75 engineers. It obtained initial funding of $10M in December of last year, with series-B funding of $8M expected to close in September, at which time the company plans to launch a secure mobile terminal targeting the enterprise market. The Dogs run a Flash-based Debian Linux distribution featuring a 2.6.10-series kernel, Firefox, Abiword, an email client, and a toolchain and development libraries. "It's not really an embedded system. It just uses Flash like a hard drive," White says, adding the Realm engineers did work to allow the device's IDE controller to support the JFFS2 wear-leveling Flash filesystem.The Dog can launch a user session less than eight seconds after being plugged in.