IntelliStar - IntelliStar's Design

IntelliStar's Design

The IntelliStar differs in design from previous WeatherStar units, as the IntelliStar is basically a customized rack-mount Intel CPU-based PC. It runs the FreeBSD operating system, running specialized software written by The Weather Channel to make it function as an IntelliStar, but otherwise using commodity hardware of the PC platform. This was done to minimize maintenance costs, and to ease upgrading of the IntelliStar units. The previous WeatherStar units used a proprietary hardware design that hampered any hardware upgrades (the Weather Star XL, for comparison, uses proprietary SGI hardware, and runs IRIX). TWC has contributed code to the FreeBSD development community, and funded the initial development of Radeon 8500/R200 generation 3D graphics drivers used under both Linux and FreeBSD.