Short answer

Tux Droid has a very basic set of standalone features that can just give it life even when the computer is shutdown. So you'll have to get your computer turned on and the dongle connected to really use your Tux Droid.

Tux Droid was initially thought as a kind of desktop agent for the Linux desktop, somehow like the small animated characters that you can have with some applications. To get feedback of your applications sent to Tux you need them running anyway.

Long answer

Now it may be fun to have Tux doing some stuff autonomously without the computer running. There are different ways we can do something. For very small stuff, it's possible to code some standalone behavior inside the CPU of tux though that will always be quite limited. There's already some kind of event manager. So when you start tux, there's a hello message and a movement sequence that is configurable. If you want tux to dance when you push a certain key of the remote or when another tux is detected, or when somebody is making some noise, that's the way to go. If you want some more complex tasks, then you'll have to roll out your own firmware and that's also possible as we provide the current firmware as open source. You should be able to modify it at your taste without much trouble if you're a bit familiar with microcontrollers. If not, that's a great way to learn it ;-)

But if you want to get a much more complex behavior, you'll need the power of a computer where the dongle is connected, i.e. to stream audio from the internet, you won't get anywhere with changing the firmware of tux. You need a box to stream the audio then play it with the dongle audio driver.

Now I'm thinking of using something like the linksys NSLU2 and port the daemon there. That's a tiny cheap box with ethernet and USB ports and an ARM CPU running Linux. There's already a community which is porting a bunch of applications to that box. If we could get the daemon and some specific applications running on that, then we'll get a full-featured Tux Droid all the time. And as the daemon works on a TCP/IP port, there's no problem for your computer to connect to it when it's turned on. Let's hope will get something like this running soon.