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An anonymous reader writes "According to a "quick survey" taken during the past two weeks of visitors to LinuxDevices.com's website, developers overwhelmingly believe that the Embedded Linux Consortium's recently released embedded Linux platform specification is valuable, and that it will help accelerate the growing use of Linux in embedded systems and devices." Update 03/05 07:10 GMT by C : Sorry about that. Obviously I left the last word off of the

There is clearly a market for this class of device. I would love a Newton that was updated with the technology now available. The Sharp SL-C700 is the closest thing that I would be willing to replace my Palm Vx with at the moment. The device is smaller than the old newtons but has the power to run anything. The biggest problems with the Sharp are the the PIM applications are lame, battery life, and the fact that there are now plans to actually release it in the US.

Apple has the expertise from the Newton to take the Sharp hardware mainstream. If the Sharp can run TrollTech and Debian, could it not run OSX and Inkwell? I would like to be able to at least compile most Linux apps to run on the platform

What I would like to see in a mini-PC/handheld/PDA in SL-C700 form-factor would be:

All day battery life

802.11b built-in

Voice-recorder with at least off-line recognition (dictation)

USB connectivity that can recharge

RS-232 (for terminal/ssh apps

2 CF/MMC slots

MUST sync with Outlook as per Palm

Good handwriting recog. as well as a non-thumb keyboard

Apple, if they didn't want to go to Xscale could use PPC in the form of the new reference design from IBM.

Come on Apple - You can do it!

Butterfly is not a Sony product, it's a company name.
They developed a grid computing architecture, backed by IBM.
Sony is a customer in this case.

Take a look at this press release:
IBM and Butterfly unveil Linux-based computing grid for gaming

Anything that you make/buy is going to essentially be performing the same task as an inverter and the normal PSU, which create a DC-DC converter when connected in series. There's no way around the fact that you need a DC-DC converter, and I HIGHLY doubt you'll find a DC-DC converter with all the proper output voltages thats cheaper than an inverter and a normal PSU.

Depending on your car, the 12v system MAY be reasonably clean, but it needs SOME filtering. Almost all 12v systems carry alternator whine. Also, during starting, there can be some nasty transient voltages. ALSO the voltage level can vary from as much as 15v in some vehicles to as little as 11v on a weak battery. ALSO most computers require NEGATIVE voltages. That's the real PITA. So forget about just hooking it up with a couple of regulators or something.

If you ABSOLUTELY CAN NOT use an inverter, then you're best bet is to go with an embedded mobo, rather than an ATX. Linux Devices has a pretty comprehensive list of single board computers, many of which would be much easier to run off 12v than any normal board. Of course you're not going to get as much computer for your money, but that's the way it goes.

Your cheapest option by far is to just use an inverter.

Here is a chart of what vendors think is important when choosing an embedded OS.
Linux already satisfies the four most popular criteria: Real Time capabilities, royalty free licensing, it runs on a variety of CPUs and it provides access to source code.

No wonder Motorola choose for the linux solution.

Well if you've used a SUN recently (I have one on my desk at work), you'd probably know they have a full 8-something extra buttons. These include cut, copy, paste, stop, volume, and other such nonsense like that. To be honest, I don't use them, except for STOP. The new ones have USB connections on the back, so they're actually somewhat nice because they plug into anything. Having extra buttons can be fun if you like to play with your keyboard mapping.

If you want to go the other direction, the whole wearables scene has come up with some good ones, especially the twiddler.

And finally, if you're interested in other keyboards that might be questionably functional but still look cool, you can find virtual keyboards, a lit keyboard, and a rollable keyboard. But I think in your situation, you might find the twiddler the best bet for "cool and useful item".

Well, it *is* an exciting story! In that case, here's a recently updated including recently released photos of the device from linuxdevices.com . . .

Motorola, currently the world's #2 maker of mobile phones ("handsets") with an estimated worldwide market share of 19%, today unveiled a major shift in its embedded software strategy. For future handset designs, Motorola is going with a combination of an embedded Linux operating system and Java-based middleware, along with full multimedia functionality.

The A760 handset (pictured at left and below), Motorola's initial Linux/Java handset offering, combines the functions of a mobile phone, PDA, digital camera, video player, MP3 player, speakerphone, messaging, Internet access, and Bluetooth wireless technology. Motorola says they will initially launch the A760 in Asia in 2003. Its embedded Linux OS was supplied by MontaVista Software.

To provide added perspective, LinuxDevices.com brings you this Special Report which includes the text of the Motorola announcement, and also provides a roundup of some of the many international news stories surrounding this important development . . .

Well, it *is* an exciting story! In that case, here's a recently updated including recently released photos of the device from linuxdevices.com . . .

Motorola, currently the world's #2 maker of mobile phones ("handsets") with an estimated worldwide market share of 19%, today unveiled a major shift in its embedded software strategy. For future handset designs, Motorola is going with a combination of an embedded Linux operating system and Java-based middleware, along with full multimedia functionality.

The A760 handset (pictured at left and below), Motorola's initial Linux/Java handset offering, combines the functions of a mobile phone, PDA, digital camera, video player, MP3 player, speakerphone, messaging, Internet access, and Bluetooth wireless technology. Motorola says they will initially launch the A760 in Asia in 2003. Its embedded Linux OS was supplied by MontaVista Software.

To provide added perspective, LinuxDevices.com brings you this Special Report which includes the text of the Motorola announcement, and also provides a roundup of some of the many international news stories surrounding this important development . . .

When will Sharp start selling the A300 in the US? Really the A300 is the SL model I am interested in, but I see no plans on making it available.

IMHO the A300 is the sweetest Linux based PDA Sharp has produced. Here's a URL describing it from linuxdevices.com: http://www.linuxdevices.com/articles/AT5915008901. html

> I want something that works, not something to make a political stand.

It does work. And trust me, Sharp's not exactly a bunch of singing hippy freaks. There's no "political stand" involved on their part. All of Japan just seems to be chosing Linux to run their consumer electronics.

> It's got a larger everything. The fucker's just a mini-laptop.

Did you even look at the photos? It's barely any bigger than the SL-5500, which is barely bigger than a typical PalmOS or PocketPC PDA. Or were you looking for one of those "PDAs on a memory card" 'Rex' things?

My Zaurus lives happily in my pant pocket, along with my cellphone, a pen and a stick of lip balm. Maybe you have very small pockets, or something...?

I'm glad to see the GNOME team still plugging along. Even though KDE is at 3.1 and has already won Germany over, it isn't too late for GNOME to grab a nice market. I just hope they spent the time and effort to get it right this time and that their early release isn't an attempt to "appear relevant" in the face of KDE's overwhelming lead. I really hate that kind of rat race mentality.

There are several PDAs today running Linux very well; the Sharp Zaurus is the best known, but a bunch of Chinese and Taiwanese manufacturers are about to come out with a flood of Linux-based PDAs as well (see this article in the same mag as the feature). I suspect in about a year we'll see a lot of commodity PDAs based on Linux and featuring the usual color 320x240, MP3, SD slot, etc.

Linux is not specifically "architectured" for desktops or servers. If you strip away a lot of the modules, utilities and GUI fluff, it's a pretty small OS actually. Someone has a single floppy firewall distribution based on Linux. I mean, try getting Windows on a single floppy, not to mention Solaris, MacOS, etc.

Regarding why IBM would do this, I believe they're just poking Microsoft in the eye. IBM's always been the premier marketing organization despite their prodigious technical resources. So they spent a couple of million designing a "reference PDA"; that's a tiny drop in the bucket for them and it encourages lots of hungry manufacturers in Asia (and, one would like to hope, in the West as well) to jump on the Linux bandwagon and, hence, weaken PocketPC. Seems like a pretty smart and sane move to me. ;-)

Motorola/Metrowerks unveils Linux-based PDA reference design.

Here's another interesting announcement from LinuxWorld today: "Motorola's Metrowerks software tools subsidiary demonstrated a pre-release version of its Linux-based OpenPDA mobile device software platform at LinuxWorld in New York today. The software was shown running on AMD's Alchemy Au1100 system-on-chip based Mobile Client Reference Design Kit (RDK)."

USB 1.1 host

10/100 Ethernet

Serial port

8- or 16-bit PCMCIA slot

JTAG debug port

Flash programming port -----

One word: WANT.

Here's the press release and spec sheet.

It's coming to the US... ... but Dynamism have done their own English port already. (Any stories/opinions of Dynamism?)

Keyboard doesn't look great (but at least it's better than the original tiny Zaurus one)

I've always wanted something tiny I could carry around that would give me decent QWERTY with a landscape screen capable of displaying VT100 readably (or, better, actual graphics) that could also connect to the net when I'm out and about. This looks like it (though expansion is limited to SD & CF - that's enough for WiFi and BlueTooth, though.)

-- Yoz

Linux is not itself an embedded OS,

I'm very skeptical of these kinds of devices. For example, how many people really want stock quotes on their watches? Is there real value in that? How is a stock ticker on a watch significantly better than a stock ticker on a PDA or cell phone? Also, beyond the cool factor, how important is atomic time to Joe Sixpack? Let's face it, if it isn't significantly better, then only technogeeks will care about it. It'll die a quick death. But wait, there's more. The other factor is this. Even if the product is significantly better in terms of functionality, if the usability sucks then uptake of the product in the market could be minimal. IMHO there are many strikes against these products becoming mainstream products any time soon.

1. More on usability: webword.com (Disclaimer: This is one of my web sites.)

2. Bell Labs Reports on Progress Towards "Dick Tracy" Watch

3. Check Out a Watch Dick Tracy Would Envy

4. IBM stuffs Linux into "Dick Tracy's watch"

5. A User Interface Toolkit for a Small Screen Device

6. Is Timing Ripe for Wrist PDAs?

Have a look at this whitepaper by Matt Asay. It's been a while since I read it, but IIRC he argues that linking has come to be viewed as not creating a derivative work, and thus linking does not invoke copyright law. Thus you are not required to accept the GPL license in order to link. [IANAL.] The whitepaper was originally discussed in this article.

Meanwhile, a glance at Metrowerks website shows the company leaning strongly toward PDA applications, the market for which has been slumping as of late, and, as Gartner Dataquest's analysis tells it:

PDAs are entering a period in which they will be embraced by enterprises as core infrastructure, like PCs.This portends a gradual shift away from Palm and toward Microsoft. Although Palm devices remain more prevalent in enterprises, Microsoft has been adept in providing the building blocks enterprises require. Most companies Gartner talks with are moving with, or planning to move with, the Microsoft wave.

Though the overall outlook may seem bleak for these companies, a winner is someone who can look a challenge and see an opportunity. As a libertarian, I am anti-monolpoly, and thus I hope Metrowerks' leadership can show the kind of vision needed to put Lineo's intellectual capital to good use in counteracting the Microsoft menace.

I've been thinking about getting started in embedded Linux, with the end goal of creating simple devices (little robots or whatever).

Searching Google for "embedded linux" and similar turns up alot of hits, but most are about as useful as searching for "c"

It seems like most of what I can find is either information about what devices (SBCs, etc) you can run one of the embedded linux distros on (for example, LinuxDevices mentioned in the article seems to focus on this) or assumes you're already an embedded Linux expert and can hack a kernel like Linus himself.

I've been thinking about buying something like uCsimm to play around with, but without being able to find any "getting started" type info, I'm concerned it would just be a waste of money.

So my question is, what are the good resources out there with introductory level coverage of embedded Linux such that some of us might eventually be able to use this fine toolkit? If anyone has any links I'd really appreciate some pointers.

Thanks for these pointers. Steeplechase seems to be a close equivalent to what I was thinking about... looking for details on it brought me to for example this interesting article on a PC-based open architecture servo controller for CNC machining - interesting reading!

• Linux Kernel 2.2 (with low memory i would recommend 2.2..) or a really stripped-down 2.4 kernel, running a modern distro which is rather slick in itself, like Slackware or Debian. This will help you avoiding numerous security holes in older distros.
• There has been an article which focusses on small yet functional destop programs.
• If you want to go with really stripped-down distros, which are suitable (or optimized) for embedded computers, check this link.
• I have to agree with some of the other posters that one of the *BSD derivates can be and feel a lot smaller than full-featured, KDE3-based Linux distros...
• If security is not much of an issue for you, for whatever reason, you might want to go for an outdated Linux distro. Watch out for a 2.0 or 2.2 kernel, and libc5 instead of glibc2/libc6, or you might not gain much from the old stuff... Or even Minix? VSTa?

I tend to take your comment regarding employment of Linux-based professionals unkindly, btw, being that it's simply false -- serious UNIX admins and coders are quite frequently better paid than their Windows-centric counterparts.

It has a 400Mhz XScale processor, 64/32MB RAM, one SD slot, and one CF Type 2 slot. The battery is claimed to be able to support 4hrs 50 mins of active use. It's reasonably sized and weighs 225g, but the capacity to record sound is lacking.

Unfortunately, Sharp currently have no plans to release this beauty outside Japan. An alternative might be the HP Jornada 720, which has a 640*240 display and a keyboard. Its expansion options are arguably better. It has a 209MHz ARM processor, which may be good enough. However, it weighs half a kilo, it costs $1000(!) (at least officially), and Linux is still being ported. Yet another alternative might be the 640*480 HNT Exilien 00101/00201, but where or when that thing will be available beats me.

It's all very frustrating, because an SL-C700-like PDA with 128MB of RAM (instead of 64MB), somewhat better expandability (say one CF Type 2 slot and one Type 2 PC Card slot) and built-in sound-recording capability would solve all my life's problems. ;)

hmm. windows eh? ... http://www.linuxdevices.com/articles/AT8728350077. html - refer to the ipaq *yawn*

Check out this phone - it looks pretty good.

Hardware: * 206MHz Intel SA-1110 StrongARM system-on-chip processor * Memory: 32MB or 64MB RAM; 32MB Flash * 16-Bit color, 320x240 pixel LCD with backlight * RS232 serial port * USB port, configurable as either 'host' or 'client' device * Bluetooth wireless LAN * GSM/GPRS cellular communication * Biometric fingerprint sensor * Size: 5.4 x 3.1 x 0.8 in. * Weight: 8.8 oz. Software: * Linux operating system (2.4.x kernel) * GUI environment and PDA app suite based on Trolltech Qtopia and Opera browser * IPSec VPN protocol & security algorithms * IBM DB2E database and Websphere software * Power management to extend battery life

It's not that you want to make more trips through the scheduler, it's that you want to make them at the right time. This really revolves around questions like "should a poll call that blocks increase a thread's priority"? Now that the preemptive kernel people and the low-latency kernel people have done their thing, it's time to look at how priorities are adjusted for blocked processes.

True real-time operating systems, like QNX, are very careful about this, so that when a thead is unblocked by an external event, the thread gets control very fast unless something of higher priority is already running. In QNX, you often code a group of coordinated processes passing control back and forth very rapidly as they send messages back and forth. (Since the networking and file system in QNX are in user processes, this happens on all I/O). The QNX OS supports this as a high-performance activity. Interprocess communication came late to UNIX, and it isn't done as well. But high-interactivity and multimedia work requires such support.

Nice try, but Linus has explicitly stated that this would not get around the GPL.

See http://www.linuxdevices.com/articles/AT5041108431. html for a great article on Linus, the GPL, and kernel modules.

I hope that helps. If you are ever in need of info, always hit Google.

I hope that helps. If you are ever in need of info, always hit Google.

In brief it states that you can make binary only loadble modules with major restrictions. Most of the kernel system calls are cut off by setting a non-GPL "taint" flag. You can get around this by modifing the kernel but that is strictly unethical and most likely in breach of the GPL. The best option I see if you to create a generic driver that can be GPL'ed and have the IP bits placed in userland.

-- J5

Ogg Vorbis was ported to Sharp's Zaurus earlier this year. It has a 200MHz StrongArm processor too, so I don't see why they can't do the same with Simputer. I would love to have an inexpensive Ogg-capable handheld ^_^

Does the adoption of Palladium mean that Microsoft will recommend against the use of Windows OS's in medical and similar applications?

I suggest using Linux on the Toshiba as well. See handhelds.org and linuxdevices.com.

You're quite the subversive, aren't you? You didn't even mention that this phone runs Linux!

-Peter

All the articles say essentially the exact same thing, which sounds like a press release that the company created themselves.

gimme a V
gimme an A
gimme a PORWARE

All the articles say essentially the exact same thing, which sounds like a press release that the company created themselves.

gimme a V
gimme an A
gimme a PORWARE

Processor: Hitachi SH7727 @ 160MHz 215 MIPS speed with built-in DSP
Memory: 64 MB SDRAM, 32 MB Flash or 32MB SDRAM, 16MB Flash
Display: 3.5" Colour TFT (320x240x64k-16 bit) with circuit for automatic backlight controls.
Interfaces: Communication ports USB Host Control USB Client Serial (can be built-in) IrDA Expansion Slots SD card expansion slot for RAM expansion Compact Flash (CF2) support for peripherals (Wi-Fi, Modem, Ethernet, Bluetooth, GPS etc.) or Memory
Input Devices: Touch panel, Handwriting Recognition, Software Keyboard, Unicode Input and External Keyboard (Optional)
Power Supply: 1200 mAH Li-Polymer or Li-Ion re-chargeable battery. UL/CE certified power adapter 100V - 240V 50/60Hz AC auto switching input and 5V DC output

Heres the old Linux Devices story from last spring. I knew I saw this before.

Nice summary by O'Reilly
Sharp USA site
Zaurus user's site
Sharp Developer site
ZDNet UK review
cNet review
Linuxdevices.com review
ZDnet review
TechTV review
ThinkGeek review
PC Magazine review
IT Reviews review
Cnet shopper latest prices
Buy @ Amazon

If it's from Intel, why does the photo have a Dell logo on it?

can you run linux on it?

I think this is exciting news for those of us interested in the linux pda market. I have zaurus sl5500 and loving it. The zaurus is by far the pda with the most geek potential out there. Try finding another pda with an SD slot, CF slot and a qwerty keyboard built in, all in a reasonable size and price( contrary to the article, the zaurus is not big at all ).

From the link:

Note: Matt Asay's paper makes reference to a proposed revision to the GNU GPL. That proposal, by Matt Harris (currently CEO of Lineo), is available here . . . Suggested Revision of the GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE Version 3.0, May 2001

From the link:

Note: Matt Asay's paper makes reference to a proposed revision to the GNU GPL. That proposal, by Matt Harris (currently CEO of Lineo), is available here . . . Suggested Revision of the GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE Version 3.0, May 2001

By the way, have you noticed the privacy statement at Battlebots. Have you noticed that they reserve the right to supply 3rd party companies with your info??

I haven't heard about any BSD based bots yet - have you?.

I would also like to whine about "the lack of jobs where you get paid to fire foam darts at colleagues". </test>

there already are some Linux watches move about 1/2 way down the page.

here is a good article explaing the asteriskpbx project:

http://www.linuxdevices.com/articles/AT8678310302. html

looks like this will work great for what your looking for.

It also uses Tiny-X server instead of the standard Xfree86, which I'm sure has quite a bit to do with the reason it's not huge and doesn't suck.