We know, there are too many useful applications in the open source and Linux world, e.g., FFmpeg, MPlayer, DVDAuthor, Curl, Wget, Sed, etc.. All of these tools are doing one kind of task very perfect as the UNIX Philosophy said. But, for the end user, how to acqiure the power of these great tools, there are two main difficults in front of us: many of these are command line tool, too many normal user hate to type in the console; A real using stage need several tools work together, but how to make them work well in a united environment is a question, there are many dependences, versions between them.

We are trying to find a proper way to resolve these questions, MobileMate project is just a usecase demo. It uses the TinyCore Linux as a tiny portable Linux platform, use Bash to glue some open source tools such as MPlayer, FFmpeg(Libav), Zenity, Grep, Sed, etc., then we got a portable, self-booting appliance tool for video/audio converting. End user can run it in the virtual machine, install and running in USB, HD, MicroSD, CD, etc..

Follow the idea above, we can make many useful appliances. Is it a good way for making open source more useful? It need us to validate.