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Wind River Joins the Mobile Linux Fray
An anonymous reader writes "Embedded software powerhouse Wind River launched a Consumer Electronics Linux distribution today targeting 'mobile phones, set-top boxes, PVRs, and other small-footprint consumer devices.' The company says several phones based on its brand of Linux will begin shipping before the end of this year, and is rumored to have teamed with PalmSource, which itself is busy converting Palm OS into a software stack for Linux mobile phones."
PyQT and PyKDE bindings?
I think you mean Riverbank.
Or is it the tools, this CELF of which they speak?
Consumer Electronics Linux Forum (CELF) (currently down)
All the major consumer electronics comanies are members of CELF.
WindRiver still sell their ScopeTools (MemScope, ProfileScope, StethoScope) that rely on a proprietary backend being loaded onto the Linux box. I, personally, don't think the tools are worth the price of the plastic in the CDs they come on. Others here seem to like them.
You also get WindRiver Workbench (an Eclipse plugin). It's cute but there are better editors and debuggers out there if you must pay for them. I prefer Emacs for editing and good old-fashioned Makefiles for building. I much prefer DDD (data display debugger) which is based on GDB for debugging.
Their "system Viewer" (aka WindView) is nothing more than the free (speech/beer) Linux Trace Tool (LTT) from http://www.opersys.com/LTT/.
WindRiver also have a very restrictive license that tries to claim you're not allowed to redistribute the source code to any of the GPL tools. I haven't read it in full but that is the general gist of it.
Management types seem to love them because they have "support". Support is fine, when support can help. I don't see how paying approx $50k US/year for "support" works when I have solved all of the problems we find with the Linux distributions we have used. Speaking of problems, the only ones with real problems were the expensive "commercial" ones.
MontaVista are probably the most trimmed down and GPL friendly of the embedded Linux crowds. They give out their distro on CD and because It's GPL'd they can't stop you using it. Their supplied "tools" are based on OSS tools like GDB. We weren't allowed to even see the tools before we paid for them. They claim that there are screenshots available; like that really helps decide if it's good!
BlueCat won't work unless your development host is RedShit9. They use an encrypted ISO image that they mount via loopback to install. Of course, they were too dumb to use a real encryption and, instead, used XOR so the password is visible just by looking into the encrypted file with Less. You can then xor the file agains the password to get an unencrypted ISO that you can mount and install. Their distro looks like it was based on Scratchbox (see below). Their "tools" are also based on OSS tools. They let us see the tool at a demo by the sales guy, but they wouldn't let us actually get hands-on to see what the tool could really do.
BuildRoot is GPL and free (speech and beer). It comes from the uClibc group and makes a uClibc-based distro. It works beautifully and has a wonderful mailing list/support. It is a piece of cake to add packages to it and get it to build them for you. I added some very complex pieces of software with almost zero effort apart from making a makefile to do various parts of the build (download the tarball, uncompress it, untar it, configure it, make it, install it, clean it). All you have to do is put in the right commands to do each of those steps under the right targets. You can have your package appear in their make menuconfig menu and it has a cool dependency arrangement so it's easy to remove packages without breaking anything.
Scratchbox is similar, but it attempts to create an entire hidden build environment inside your host that you chroot into to use. You can build/install everything inside of it without really worrying about cross compile issues (you're in a chroot so the compiler/headers/libs are defaulted to cross compile correctly). It's also free as in beer. Scratchbox can build anything, including Linux, BSD, glibc, uclibc on i386, arm, ppc, etc. It doesn't care as long as you can build a toolchain to put inside of it before you start building packages.
There are also umpteen other tiny Linux builds to do different things available and they are all free. There are routers, firewalls, mail servers, single disk console-based things, two disk X-things with web browsers, etc.
These companies make a profit by relying on the ignorance of management-types that want "support" and think that paying for something is good business sense because it must be good. This is the problem you get when you let accountants run businesses instead of engineers! If you want support, pay for it, otherwise get buildroot or Scratchbox and have quality.
I drink to make other people interesting!