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Embedded Linux Journal Ceases Print Publication
Anonymous Coward writes "SSC Publications (the publisher of Linux Journal) today announced that the May/June 2002 issue will be the final stand-alone print edition of Embedded Linux Journal (ELJ). Future ELJ content will now be "embedded" into Linux Journal, as a monthly feature section. ELJ's website, ELJonline, will continue to regularly feature new embedded Linux articles, reviews, news, and contests."
Former roommate Don Marti (also the former Editor for ELJ) told me that "Desktop Linux has learned a lot from Embedded Linux and Vice-Versa, you can expect Linux Journal to pick up where ELJ left off, and continue pushing linux on embedded platforms. Picking Linux as your embedded OS means you don't have to compromise in functionality, tools or community support, which means Linux on embedded will always be your best choice. If you are doing any embedded development at all, read linux journal and rejoice! as the pain of developing on proprietary embedded OSes has passed."
You don't need to be Kreskin to see that Embedded Linux is not dying.
Hell, just about all the C/C++ magazines went out of business as well. It basically means that readers are eschewing print magazines for online magazines.
Although I'd be quite upset if DDJ went out of business. It makes some of the best toilet reading material, not to mention the ads that are great for wiping in a pinch.
I have been pwned because my
Relatively few people are buying commercial embedded Linux distros, so these companies are going under (e.g Lineo). There's a lot of press, picking up on this trend, implying that embedded Linux is dead.
However, the fact that engineers don't need to buy expensive support to get their embedded open source OSes to run is really a positive sign for embedded Linux, despite the cries that it may be dead.
i can't say that i was surprised when i got the email saying that ELJ was going out of print. I never asked for, or paid for a subscription to ELJ. My job has never involved working with embedded linux. Yet for no apparent reason, they felt the need to send me a glossy magazine every month.
Don Marti .... the former Editor for ELJ told me that..."If you are doing any embedded development at all, read linux journal and rejoice! as the pain of developing on proprietary embedded OSes has past."
passed. No wonder he's the former editor...
I was reading an article last week in EE Times about an apparent attitude shift in the embedded linux area. The article claimed that enthusiasm is dying.
EE Times interviewed Lineo's CEO who said: "We assumed in 1999 that the market would pay for embedded Linux the same way it pays for VxWorks. But we've learned that a model built on extracting revenue from nothing more than Linux is doomed to failure," Harris told EE Times."
I know there are people out there still using/planing to use embedded Linux but I can't help but wonder what the future really holds. Most Linux development is after all in the desktop/server markets.
Another interesting quote:
At the recent Embedded Systems Conference, Wind River chairman of the board and co-founder Jerry Fiddler told EE Times that the company no longer considers Linux to be a strong presence in the embedded market. "Linux is a phantasm," he said. "Software isn't free, and companies are beginning to realize that."
If anyone knows the embedded arena, it's Wind River.
Don't blame the editors for complying with the limitations of their publisher. Dead tree publications are durable and require scores less energy to read than an electronic medium like CD-ROMs would. Reading a magazine doesn't require flipping a power switch or plugging something in. This is entirely aside from the portability of dead tree media which is very popular among users. I can read a dead tree magazine on the pot, a train, on a park bench, in the middle of a desert, or wherever I end up at. CD-ROM copies of magazines would be nice for annual year-long wrap-up editions sort of like DDJ does but for a monthly run they are inconvienient. You also seem to ignore the fact that magazines make money from advertising and making the media electronic AND searchable means it is going to be relatively easy for people to get at articles without seeing your ads in there. For you that might seem great but for a magazine with a low circulation not being able to sell page space to advertisers and make money it is a bad thing.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
How? Well, like it or not, Embeded Linux is kind of a specific market...
Think about who their major customers would be...Embeded Systems developers. And that's the problem, if it's anything worthwhile, it won't be of any help for your specific project. And if you're doing development, you're more likely to find more helpful information online or in a good book.
Oh, yes...they can do a cute writeup on the Tivo or Netpliance hack, but once it's all said an done, it's a niche that doesn't really need its own publication.
One group that this happened with is the Amiga community. At one point in time, there were Amiga Video, Amiga 3D, Amiga Sound, Amiga Power User, Amiga Games, and General Amiga mags.
At some point someone in all of the smaller (niche) magazines decided to merge their content with the much larger, higher circulation General Amiga mags. What you got in the end was a little bit of everything and what tended to be the best of the best...
So, maybe this will just make all of the Linux mags converge into a much better publication that all users can find useful all of the time, instead of a few users finding it useful some of the time.
I have never bought ELJ but it is a pity its is going - not least because it means the quality of material online will suffer too (as there will be .
It's great being in a community and all, but the lack of commercial discipline does mean some online documentation is a little on the ropey side.
If you print rubbish in a magazine then nobody buys it. If you put it in an online site i's just a mistake.
Not quite. In an electronic format I can grep information out as long as it is not encoded in some way be it intentional encryption or just the fact the file encodes characters and patterns to save space. An HTML format page can easily have the information grepped from it without ever seeing one ad. With a PDF or PS document I can do the same thing with a little more effort. This ability is bad for a publisher because the space to sell ads is practically non-existant. What good is an interactive ad that can easily be avoided? None. You for some reason seem to think that people are going to willingly view ads. The fact many slashdotters run ad busters viewing the internet ought to suggest to you that that is complete bullshit. You also miss the crucial aspect of CD magazines, you need some electronic device in order to read it. Besides your 19.95$ subscription to the magazine how much extra are you going to pay in batteries/electricity just to read a magazine article? If you take your Newton everywhere making your electronic magazine highly portable then good for you but not enough people are going to do that making the dead tree magazine a much better option.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
First, my C.V.:
I've been a professional embedded software designer since 1987. My current project has 4 DSPs and one main processor. I have several projects out on the market (I have several more, but I got tired of pasting Google links). I run the gaumit from DSP algorithms to systems design to UI design to OS work.
OK, on to my point:
There's two ways to look at Embedded Linux. The first is to look at how much money is being made by companies selling Embedded Linux services - comparing Lineo with Wind River. By this standard, Embedded Linux isn't doing very well, because few companies are making a killing selling Embedded Linux tools. The second way is to look at design wins - how many projects are having Linux built into them. This gets tricker: how do you build up a list of design wins? For a commercial product like VxWorks, you just ask Wind River "How many new licensees of VxWorks were there this year?" But you cannot do that with Linux - as has been noted elsewhere most folks going to Embedded Linux just pull down RedHat, Debian or some other distro and run from there.
Now, let me shed some perspective on this. Embedded systems come in all sizes, from your smart themostat to telecom systems. If you are design a small device, with no display (or a very simple display), no network connectivity, and very small amounts of RAM and ROM, you don't want to use Linux - it's overkill. But, if you do the kind of stuff I do, where you have GUIs, gigabytes of disc storage, network stacks, printer support, scripting, and so on, you DON'T want to use something like VxWorks - they didn't have a DHCP client in their earlier version, they didn't have DNS, they don't have very good printer support, forget SMB (save if you wish to pretend to BE a printer), the only GUI they really support is Java on a frame buffer. Also, their hardware support is pretty lame - if you deviate just a little bit from the supported boards they have, you can kiss good support goodbye (their X-Scale ports don't activate the on-chip cache - farewell to half your CPU speed).
But would I go to Lineo for their package? No, not because of any intrisic failing of Lineo, but because I don't NEED to, and by the time I clear the crap with our Contracts person, I'm slipping schedule.
Believe me - I see the FUD in all my trade journals. The problem it they are geared to deal with the likes of Wind River, and they don't know how to measure something that can be downloaded free. Furthurmore, Debian doesn't buy ad space in EE Times, so it's hard for EE Times to get excited about them.
www.eFax.com are spammers
First, since they only seem to have given it away, how on earth were they planning to stay in business long-term? The other major problem was that their content was never terribly impressive. A large percentage of articles was devoted to product roundups and descriptions, and showcasing embedded Linux projects of various companies. Unfortunately these showcases were more of the look-what-cool-stuff-we-did-aren't-we-great variety, rather that providing lots of truly helpful information and how-tos for someone wanting to do the same. Frankly, I've gotten MUCH more useful articles on Linux embedding and programming from Circuit Cellar (Ingo Cyliax is bloody amazing) that from ELJ.
Embedded Linux Journal was one of the absolute best Mag's out there, coupled with Circuit Cellar the two made what technical magazines are supposed to be. I stopped my LJ subscription years ago when I exceeded what it's content could give me, ELJ was awesome with articles like "creating an embedded linux system from scratch" that covered topics like keeping everything small including your libs.
That publication is going to be missed... i would have paid twice the Linux Journal price for it, same as i would have paid dearly for the Perl Journal if it wasnt bastardized by the companies that bought it. It seems that the truely technical publications are dying, and only the newbie,gooey,fluffy publications are all that's left.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I've seen a number of books on the kernel internals for Linux 2.2 but I was wondering if anyone's seen any specifically dealing with kernel 2.4. I don't mean "what's coming in 2.4" at the end of the chapter, but 2.4 as a core study.
I want to start some embedded Linux/uClinux hacking but I don't want to spend a lot of time learning the internals of 2.2 only to relearn core parts (vm, networking, vfs, etc.) for 2.4.