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Huh? Metrowerks produces apple development tools, and they dabble in linux/embedded development tools. I'm pretty sure that Metrowerks is not a freescale subsidary. See for example this PR.

1 - Metrowerks is a Freescale "early tester", i.e. they get Freescale stuff first

2 - Metrowerks acquired Lineo and their Embedix Linux offering a while ago, and offer it as one of their core products. Therefore, they more than "dabble" in Linux.

For those of you wondering what this whole SCO vs. Linux thing was about, I can finally reveal the truth.

As chairman and CEO of Canopy I've done a lot for the Open Source community. I've promoted investments in companies like Linux Networx, who make the third fastest supercomputer in the world and use Linux to do it. Companies like Lineo the masters of embedded Linux. Also Trolltech producing the incredible QT widget set used by the KDE project. And of course Caldera, producing the finest Linux distribution and pushing forwards the United Linux initiative.

But one shadow lay over my record of achievements. Despite all I had done for the Linux and Open Source communities, I still had never achieved the triumph I most desperately sought. Not once had an article I submitted been accepted by Slashdot :(

I'm sure my fellow Slashdotters can understand how this gnawed away at my soul.

Together with Darl McBride and David Boies I hatched a master plan, to achieve my dream of an accepted Slashdot article or to destroy Linux trying.

Caldera would purchase IP rights from the Santa Cruz Operation and with funding from Sun and Microsoft would use them as the springboard to launch a devastating legal and PR blitz against Linux. As part of this Darl would write a searing open letter to the Open Source community, drawing responses in return. One of these from Groklaw would give me the opportunity I needed...

As you can see everything has gone exactly to plan. I have my successful Slashdot submission, and I'm sure that looking back on it you can all see it was worth any 'collateral damage' along the way.

Darl, you can call off the dogs now.

God bless you all.

Ralphie

Forget Troll Tech, he's a director of Lineo!

Now who do you think bought the SCO licences?

link (with proper &, even)

The 5600 is native Linux -- it uses an embedix distro w/ Qtopia for the front end. There's also an Open Source distribution, which frankly, I prefer.

But why would Motorola want to license from Nokia when they have already invested a great deal of money in embedded linux (through the purchase of Embedix), and sell development products (which, I guess, technically also came from the purchase of Lineo...) for it?

I too faced this dilemma when trying to make use of a batch of 486 machines donated to our computer lab. My solution required a bit of elbow grease, but ensured that my machines both ran acceptably and had the latest and most secure versions of software available to them:

• I built a Gentoo Linux system on the Athlon XP 2000+ machine in the lab, targetting all the software for 486 (gcc -O3 -m486 -march=486 -fomit-frame-pointer -s) and building a very stripped-down 2.4 kernel with only the bare necessities. I also replaced the standard GNU shell tools with BusyBox and GNU libc with uC-libc. On this fast machine, the compilation cycle didn't take long, and I was able to build and install everything into a temporary /install directory in less than four hours.
• Once that was done, i tarred up the /install directory I had built and burned it onto an ISO along with a bootimage from tomsrtbt mini-Linux distro.
• I then booted each 486 machine in turn from the CD, and used a shellscript I had written which created an ext2 partition, formatted it, and untarred the contents of my custom gentoo setup onto the disk, and set up grub to boot into it.

under linux, everyone still has to write their own shit until there's some decent open source toolkit for that and that of course means a longer time to market

Exactly my point my friend. Now, you've got to ask yourself who is best positioned in PVR market to do that? Here's one for PDAs and other embedded categories Lineo

If you want a graphical browser that will run on a 486, you might consider running DOS and Arachne (there's also a Linux version now, I believe). When you ask why use DOS, since it's not protection safe or supports multitasking, realize that at least the latter is a performance penalty and the former usually is. In any case, there are a good many various DOS internet tools here:

http://www.fdisk.com/doslynx/

If you have an old 486 lying around, it's probably already got DOS running on it, so why not give running some DOS internet tools a go? You can also try out DR-DOS or FreeDOS. I'd suggest the former, if you can validly use it (go to ftp://ftp.lineo.com/pub/drdos/LICENSE.TXT to find out). You can then go to www.drdos.net to download it. Anyways, I hope this helps, since old 486s aren't really trash, even if you can't easily use Linux or Windows on it because of archaic hardware.

Oddly enough, I'm still not exactly sure what they were trying to do.

WTF? I realize that slashdot editors aren't known for being well-informed, but doesn't it bother anyone else that they seem to be flaunting their ignorance on the front page?

CT doesn't know what Lineo did. So what? He doesn't own an embedded systems company does he? He wasn't exactly their target market. What Lineo did is quite clear from their website, they were a service company that would help you put Linux on embedded systems.

So if you designed pda/mp3player/gps/whatever hardware and thought putting Linux on it would be a good idea, you would go to these guys and get them to hook you up for a fee. A couple years later, when you came out with a new model or something else or whatever, you'd go back. It's not that fucking complicated. And the fact that the 'average' slashdotter might not know what they do didn't matter, because they couldn't give a shit about you either.

There are a surprising number of dot-coms in that situation. If the web site was outsourced, it can outlive the company by months, until the hosting service gets around to deleting it.

My old BWUNN web site, which was a takeoff on the promotion for the movie "AI", is still up, even though I closed the account with the hosting service long ago, and they stopped billing me. The labor time to flush accounts may be more than the cost of keeping them up until the equipment gets retired.

Are there co-located servers from dead dot-coms still in place and running? Those might survive, forgotten in some hosting facility, for years. See if you can find any.

What of embedded systems? For a long time, there've been folks making money off having the dominant embedded systems OS be proprietary. Nonetheless, some open source companies are making an impact. (I work for MVista, btw, and so am more than a bit biased on the subject). There've been folks for a long time who've seen money in operating systems for routers, set-top boxes and PDAs, yet there are companies using Linux for all of these purposes.

The point I'm trying to make is that while there may be money to be made doing the proprietary thing, if going to open source drives your costs and development time down sufficiently (and it drives them down pretty darned far!), it can still be the most profitable thing to do in the long run. Maintaining your own OS and development tools is expensive; use OSS for your base (and outsource all the parts that only support your application) and focus on whatever distinguishes your product, and you can get more done faster -- and that's good for the bottom line.

Microlite supports DVD-RAM on Linux. If you want to spend a lot of money, Lineo has a pricey product.

Of course, with the new Linux kernel there is native DVD-RAM support. I can't swear to Solaris but, I'm pretty sure it's in there too. Use IDE, it's cheaper, more readily available and just as fast.

Embedded linux is so great because it comes entirely in source. The embedded market is the embedded market so you could do things to the drivers to adjust the operating system to your needs.

Let's say you want to build a hard-real-time audio processor, with windows such a thing is simply impossible, because adjusting the scheduler is not something you will be able to do. Furthermore the driver for the audio card IN SOURCE is required to test for problems there.

In my experience you can get an embedded linux kernel running on 3 megs of flash and 16 megs of ram (they didn't have anything smaller, so excuse me).

There are a lot of useful projects working with embedded linux (see opensource.lineo.com. let's see them duplicate those first. Also software that works on linux can simply work, without modifications (although people tend to make it somewhat smaller) on embedded linux.

Besides the fact that the US web site http://www.sharp-usa.com when viewed with K-Meleon displayed a page indicating to upgrade to Internet Explorer 4 or Netscape 4, I was quite unable to find a lot of info.
A few web searches took me through the UK web site (they have a pdf spec sheet) to the developer's web site (why didn't I think of it in the first place ?!).

Both the Linux spec and Java are interesting. It runs PersonalJava 1.2 with the Truffle AWT L&F. On the Linux part, it implements Embedix - the 2.4 kernel. I find very interesting it supports BusyBox + some additional commands.

"It provides minimal replacements for most of the utilities you usually find in fileutils, shellutils, findutils, textutils, grep, gzip, tar, etc. In addition, by using the network or a Compact Flash card, useful Linux tools can be used."

Also, I find very comforting that on the interface part we got Qt/Embedded which is quite cool.

To sum it up... I'm a developer looking for a PDA. $400 is pricey, but the Zaurus is not a gadget it's a real tool. I hope I'll find the funds to get one for Xmas :)

philipx

Linux is not an RTOS

Yeah, but can it be? I remember reading something about a year ago, Lineo creating a a Linux based RTOS. (small footprint)

That's not entirely true. Caldera did purchase the assets of Digital Research from Novell, and begain a lawsuit against Microsoft, and settled for ~$250M. They must have needed the money badly because they settled, even though their case seemed very strong and an eventual win almost guaranteed. During this time Lineo (nee Caldera) did sell embedded solutions based on the DR-DOS code base. They also purchased the Arachne web browser for DOS, ported it to their Linux offering and sold it as DR-WebSpider. At the time they sold both DR-DOS and Linux based embedded packages, targeting the Kiosk market. They also made the source to DR-DOS (Caldera OpenDOS) available for the first release or two but closed it back up due to lack of interest, the difficulty of getting the build environment setup and business reasons.

DR-DOS lives on as the bootstrap for Novell Netware and I'm sure that there were a few other clients for embedded DOS (IIRC Kavouras used it, I can't remember others). DR-DOS, AFAIK, is still available for download and personal use, and Caldera has packaged it for use with DOSEmu. So while they did use DR-DOS for the lawsuit money (A perfectly valid and appropriate lawsuit if there ever was one) they also based the beginnings of their embedded offerings on it. Lineo is one of the better embedded companies right now, gunning for Wind River's marketshare, they are not going away.

Further DR-DOS history links

• http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~kkoster/micro soft/caldera.html
• http://www2.gol.com/users/joewein/dri.html

According to my anonymous source at PortalPlayer, it's based on Lineo's RXTC microkernel. Of course, the ``application'' side has been hacked on quite a bit and has had significant additions to the database and filesystem added, but it's still RXTC based.

Also of interest to those building tiny apps is uClibc an embedded C library I've been putting pogether for the past year or so. It is working quite nicely these days, and since I use almost stock glibc 2.2.4 header files, porting apps is usually involved typing 'make'.

Erik
(the BusyBox guy)

On the other side, those utilities only work on GNU/Linux and GNU/Hurd.

On the other side, those utilities only work on GNU/Linux and GNU/Hurd.

I think if this had only been released sooner, the Cue Cat could've made it financially. Hopefully other companies will learn from this the perils of ignoring the Linux userbase!

Don't forget that MAPS is free for individuals' mail servers. It only costs if your server is for a business. This sounds wholly reasonable for me.

Yeah, of course. Because we all know that businesses have lots of money.

There is a lot of good stuff here. Some of the more useful and general-purpose patches -- such as VLAN, TUX, and Software Suspend -- should get a chance to become mainstream. The various IPC and speed improvements should make it in, too.

There's currently a debate over which real-time scheduler is the best. Personally, I'd like to see it resolved in the same way as the other options with choices: let all of them be integrated into the mainstream, and let the user select which one to use, either at compile or boot time! I'd like to see an option in the kernel configuration, asking what real-time scheduler you wanted: MontaVista, RTLinux, RTSched, Linux-SRT, RTAI, DWCS, something else, or simply the default.

Linux needs a real-time scheduler today. Currently, things become choppy whenever it decides to service the system in some way, such as syncing the disk. Playing movies, audio/video recording, burning CD's, even playing games would benefit from real-time support. I hope that this can become mainstream in 2.6!

Super eurobeat from Avex and Konami unite in your DANCE!

Maybe thier recent version of DRDOS will help ;) (seriously-- support for legacy apps may be a good thing for some potential customers).

You're forgetting that DR-DOS belongs to Lineo, formerly Caldera Thin Clients, independent from Caldera for a few years now.

Lineo, unlike Caldera, is gaining customers instead of losing them, has made Microsoft their bitch (see the DR-DOS settlement), and wholeheartedly believes in the GPL. See http://www.lineo.com/news_events/announcements/200 1/05.03.html for their response to Microsoft's attack on the GPL.

Cool. Looks like another sucess story for BusyBox too. BusyBox is going to take over the world. Muhahahahahaha!

That's exactly what I do. I used DHCP to assign a private subnet that I dont route and then PoPToP to establish a connection that I assign a ppp IP that I do route for the laptops. Works perfectly.

How about
lineo Their headquarters is in SLC

Ever hear of BusyBox?? Grab that, add a kernel, grab a floppy, run genromfs.. yada yada yadya... you get a floppy with a nice basic linux distro for about 700K (perhaps less).

check it out, it's pretty cool.

-Andy

RTLinux should be able to fit your needs. The folks atLineo can give you consulting on a complete solution and help guide you along the way.

Bingeldac denies any responsibility for the
spelling and/or grammatical errors above.

Actually, the 68000-series CPUs on which the Amiga was based are mostly 32-bit. The original 68000 CPU was not fully 32-bit, but the 68020 and up were. Linux requires a 68020 or higher with an MMU.

Yeah, the 68000 and 68010 were 16 bit CPUs with 24 bits of address space. The 68020 and up are 32 bits. I don't remember if the 68060 made it to 64 bit, but I don't think so, I think it was just 32 bit with 48 bit addressing or something wonky like that. You could get a 60MHz '060, though, not too shabby, especially when AmigaDOS runs suitably on a 7.14MHz 68000.

Anyway, the point of this message:

After seeing the uClinux homepage, I decided to try to apply the patches these guys made to the standard m68k subtree. This way, I thought, it'd be possible to boot a Linux kernel on old 68000 machines which have no MMU. And I was right. So if you have an old Atari ST, Amiga or Mac, you might want to look at these patches, or even help a hand...
(From http://www.esat.kuleuven.ac.be/~pcoene/atari.html)

And

What is uClinux?
uClinux is a derivative of Linux 2.0 kernel intended for microcontrollers without Memory Management Units (MMUs). (From http://www.uclinux.org/description/)

So far, uClinux runs on the Palm Pilot and on the uCsimm. Paul Coene's setup will boot on Atari ST (another 68000-based box, much like an amiga without all the cool custom chips) and in the STonX Atari ST emulator.

I'd disagree with you if you had said that GNU/Linux just can't be your grandmother's OS because I think it can, but that's just something we'll have to wait and see.

I do disagree with you when you say that Linux just can't be your grandmother's OS. Linux can drive embedded systems and Linux can drive VCRs, and soon Linux will drive a game console. I have confidence enough in your grandmother that she could opperate any of these (well, depends on the embedded system) easier than any Mac or Windows PC. Just because it's Linux doesn't mean there's a console.

Basically, there's no reason your grandmother needs to know what kernel she's using, and whoever can show me that the Linux kernel is missing something needed to make a easy interface, i'll buy that person a beer.

Now, whether your grandmother will be recompiling her patched kernel source anytime soon, may be a different matter.

-ben.c

Look at busybox. It's a small version of ls and friends.

These days, most embedded Linux systems use a copy of the kernel, glibc 2.0.7 (or libc5 or uClibc), busybox, plus a copy of whatever applications they need. You will find that more and more, more embedded Linux systems are surprisingly similar at their core.

It never really fails to amaze me how many people totally miss sites like Lineo They make Embedix and several other cool versions of Linux such as realtime Linux.

I am a huge BSD fan myself but people almost always never even give Lineo a second glance. They did a whole lot of very cool things to get Linux embedded.

They use A reduced libc (greatly;), Ash for the shell

The kernel is tightened up and is much smaller.

It comes with two graphics drawing utilities that are all text based for doing any kind of graphics stuff.

For embedded apps I do not believe Lineo is as good as QNX this is absed on my limited experience with the capabilities of the two OS'

Anyhow :)

Jeremy

The new version of FooCat BarCode (0.1.3) returns author, title, url and image url (cover shot) for books, CDs and DVDs in tab-delimited format. Check the CueCat Project page later today.

Here's an example:


^[[21~.C3nZC3nZC3nXE3b7DxjZCNnX.fHmc.C3PWDxf3Dxn 6ChfX.
DATA 000000002838610102 UPA 093624609322 9362460932
CUE 9362460932 http://t.dcnv.com/CRQ/1..ACTIVATIONCODE.04.c3Nzc3N zc3Nxe3B7dXJzcnNx.FhMC.c3pwdXF3dXN6cHFx. 0 http://www.warnerbros.com/pages/music/index.jsp?fr omtout=home_menu_music_item1 WARNER BROS. RECORDS, INC.
BN 093624609322 http://search.borders.com/fcgi-bin/db2www/search/s earch.d2w/Details?code=093624609322&medi aType=Music&searchType=ISBNUPC&prodID= Return Of The Rentals Rentals (The) /web_images/products/00/15/26/c/15262574_c.gif


tab delimited fields, one record per line.

---- ----

If you'd sooner have your cat on /dev/scanners/cuecat than hanging off the back of a Windows box then you can patch your kernal today... CueCat Driver 0.1.8 was released on Freshmeat mere hours ago.

The uClinux ports page has a picture of a CISCO 3000 running uClinux. The picture was taken with a AXIS web camera the really cool thing is that the new AXIS 2100 WEB camera runs uClinux. A great commercial use for uClinux if you ask me. As for the older CISCO 3000 .. I just think it is neat! uClinux running on the Motorola 68EN302 processor. Linux on mmu-less devices is truely here to stay. If customs will let me through the border with them, I will bring the CISCO and the AXIS camera to the ESC trade show in San Jose. I will be at the Lineo booth.

The uClinux ports page has a picture of a CISCO 3000 running uClinux. The picture was taken with a AXIS web camera the really cool thing is that the new AXIS 2100 WEB camera runs uClinux. A great commercial use for uClinux if you ask me. As for the older CISCO 3000 .. I just think it is neat! uClinux running on the Motorola 68EN302 processor. Linux on mmu-less devices is truely here to stay. If customs will let me through the border with them, I will bring the CISCO and the AXIS camera to the ESC trade show in San Jose. I will be at the Lineo booth.

That's right, the newest drivers seem to be back online, so grab em fast, because an accouncement on freshmeat posted by someone close to the project says 'we may be forced to remove it again". Grab your copy at http://oss.lineo.com/projects.html before they're all gone!

This time, if something happens, there will be people with mirrors ready.

--

BusyBox is a single binary that includes all of the following in one binary:

ar, basename, cat, chgrp, chmod, chown, chroot, chvt, clear, cp, cut, date, dc, dd, deallocvt, df, dirname, dmesg, du, dumpkmap, dutmp, echo, false, fbset, fdflush, find, free, freeramdisk, fsck.minix, grep, gunzip, gzip, halt, head, hostid, hostname, id, init, insmod, kill, killall, length, ln, loadacm, loadfont, loadkmap, logger, logname, ls, lsmod, makedevs, mkdir, mkfifo, mkfs.minix, mknod, mkswap, mktemp, more, mount, mt, mv, nc, nslookup, ping, poweroff, printf, ps, pwd, reboot, renice, rm, rmdir, rmmod, sed, setkeycodes, sh, sleep, sort, swapoff, swapon, sync, syslogd, tail, tar, tee, telnet, test, touch, tr, true, tty, umount, uname, uniq, update, uptime, usleep, uudecode, uuencode, wc, which, whoami, yes, zcat, [

So 8 Megs begins to look even roomier.

Officially, they claim it isn't, but they probably forgot to remove it from their ftp servers, it's still here.

It might be worth your while to go to ftp.lineo.com/pub/drdos and try a copy of their fine product. It does it's own "DOS Extend"ing, and can task-switch or multitask (although the implementation isn't as smooth as, say, Linux). It's much cooler than MS-DOS in many respects. If I had to use DOS, I'd pick up a license for it in a heartbeat. Of course, you don't need a license to "evaluate" it for 90 days, if I remember correctly.

You can get DR DOS, the embeddable MS-DOS-compatible operating system, from their FTP server or (because it's shareware) from one of the many mirrors (I'll be setting one up in September when I return to school).

can be found here. Funny that the article didn't mention this, but on the other hand it HAS stopped them from being slashdotted.

Nicholas

Lurked around at Lineo website a bit, and found this.
Is the "Not for distribution free download" really compliant with GPL?
There is a free download at the developer info page, but that doesn't matter does it?

<<Of course there's also the native Atari GUI, GEM. I've a feeling you can get the source for DR's GEMDOS now, but I may be wrong. >>

GEM was originally a PC product, ported to a cut-down version of CM/P-68K (GEMDOS) on the ST. The PC version is now owned by Lineo, the thin-clients division of Caldera, and it has made PC GEM GPLed free software. Efforts are afoot to update it and bring it up to parity with commercial GEM developments such as Magic which run on modern ST-compatibles like the Milan.

You can check out progress on the prject, download source and binaries and join the discussion mailing list on the FreeGEM homepage.

Why, get support from Lineo, of course.

The crinkly bits compared to a palm are:

• 235 MIPS @ 206 MHz (Palm is 2.7 MIPS @ 16MHz)
• 2.5 million transistors in 0.35 micron technology (image if they made it in 0.18 mircron!)
• IO = USB, IrDA, serial, audio/telecom CODECs, PCMCIA, CompactFlash
• Color/grey scales LCD at 1024x1024. However, the only touchscreens it advertises that it works with are 320x240 pixel screens.

The pictures on the original page indicate that Linux will run out of 32-megs of ROM and 32-megs of RAM. It also looks like SAMSUNG is going to try to take advantage of all the chip's features (the disappointing thing about Palm is that they didn't take advantage of all the Dragonball's features).

The thing to remember is that Samsung is like only putting together a reference design from Intel with a reference implementation of Linux (probably from Lineo) and standard off-the-shelf apps (like MP3 players) with minor modifications. The PDA-style apps are probably the Lineo PDA suite. Getting all this to work well in a limitted power budget will be tough enough. The first version will probably not contain any wizbang features beyond this.

The burning questions I have:

• Does it come with a TCP/IP stack?
• Does it use X Windows?