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Linux to Power Most Motorola Phones
raffe writes "Motorola will begin selling its first cell phone based on Linux this year and says most future models will follow suit, a major sign of the growing popularity of operating system outside its stronghold on high-end computers."
But symian os is already OSS and probably better for mobile phones (since Nokia spearheaded the modular phone movement).
Now a Linux development kit for symian would be nice though.
Linux is GPL so any kernel modifications must be posted. However, loaded modules can be held closed. Also all software running on the Linux kernel can also be kept a secret.
As the article says, the custom software will run in Java running on Linux, so it will be a JVM hosted by Linux, but Linux will probably not be visible to the end user.
And when speaking about Java applets running on phones. That has been done by both Ericsson and Nokia for a while now.
...the butt awful interface on every motorola I've ever used.
Actually seriously, all motorlas I've use right up till the v66 are appaulingly horrible to do anything with. Before I would actually buy one they really need to sort this out. Reading a text message was an exercise in hell ffs.
Its worth noting that Yamaha (the music gear maker, not the motorcycle maker) announced recently that they would be using an embedded version of linux for most of their keyboards in the near future.
And when speaking about Java applets running on phones. That has been done by both Ericsson and Nokia for a while now
And, in Japan, on Sony, Panasonic, Sanyo, Sharp, Toshiba, Dentsu, and others' phones.
Nokia is just buying its technology from Sanyo and passing it off as its own in Europe and North America, as is Ericsson with Sony's technology.
The OS itself and its subsystems (GSM/GPRS, IR/BT, camera, voice recognition, etc) aren't written in Java; they're written in very tight, small, fast code, usually C or C++ with bits of assembler. But the phone supports a Java engine so it can run Java apps, which makes it easy for 3rd party developers to target the phone. Like Microsoft did with Windows in the 90's: encourage the developer community, and your product gains mindshare.
Chuck Norris: Socialism == a thousand years of darkness.
No need to put Linux inquotes. Linux isn't (nor should it be) much more than a scheduler, memory management, hardware abstraction (drivers) and some low-level protocol abstrations(IPv4 stack, etc.). Almost all of the drivers and protocols can be configured out of the kernel at compile time, so of course the cellphone manufacturers aren't going to compile in all of the options (nor include them as modules). What you're left with is a scheduler, a vm subsystem, a virtual filesystem subsystem, and a handful of drivers and kernel-implemented protocols. What did you think "Linux" was?
Copyright Violation:"theft, piracy"::Anti-Trust Violation:"thermonuclear price terrorism"<-Overly dramatic language.
Would you care to elaborate on how Linux is perfect for embedded systems?
Because it's easy to strip it down to the absolute bare minimum you need - you get all the code. For the same reason it's easy to bugfix. It's robust and well tested. It's fast. With the preemptible kernel patch it does soft real-time very well, and can do hard real-time with other extensions. It has device drivers coming out of its ears. It supports all the same APIs that full-blown desktop/server Linux does, so you can develop and test the application software on a Linux PC and then it'll run on your embedded system. This also means there's enormous quantities of pre-written software you can use to help out, and most of it is free. It's ported to every CPU architecture you can think of, and probably a few you can't. If you don't have an MMU, well, there are versions of Linux that can do without. Most importantly of all, it's either free or cheap, depending on whether you do the work stripping it down yourself or whether you get an embedded Linux vendor to do it for you.
The only real black mark against it as an embedded OS is the lack of hard real-time as standard, but this is fixable, and irrelevant to most embedded apps anyway. Otherwise, yes, it is pretty much perfect for embedded systems. Why do you think it's doing so well? :)
Remember that Motorola owns Metrowerks. Metrowerks just recently bought Embedix, the company that formerly was Lineo. That means Motorola now controls a major chunk of embedded Linux intellectual property. Yes, lots of it is GPL, but Lineo also developed a lot of their own IP around the Linux platform that Motorola can now leverage.