> Charles Steinkuehler, 2001-04-25 12:45 -0500
> >I'm currently banging on the ELJ eval kit, trying to get it to do
> >something useful...I'll report on BlueCat linux when I get a bit farther
> >along. They do something like we were talking about for development.
> >They build an entire directory structure (in this case with their own
> >compiler, kernel source, and even RPM database). You cd into this
> >directory, run a setup script, and PRESTO! you're all set to
> >cross-compile.
>
> Charles,
> I talked to LynuxWorks at the Embedded Systems Conference. The rep. said
> they didn't support floppies as a target, or generic images. This means
> that we would have to create an image for every hardware combination. Was
> the rep. wrong?
So far, the Blue-Cat stuff has a very embedded feel to it. No standard
linux utilities required/provided at runtime (you have to custom build a
disk image if you want things like a shell or the 'ls' command, etc). It
even comes with it's own boot loader (like syslinux, except it does tftp/nfs
over the network). It's mainly geared towards booting & running a custom
program. We could probalby use it as a base, but using something like
HardHat, which is actually packaging standard linux apps, would probably
save a lot of work.
While a lot of this becomes moot if we have our own packaging format, it's
still nice to have a base distribution that provides major functional
packages (like networking, apache, sendmail, etc), so folks have a reference
for how to setup init-scripts, where to put config files, etc. More and
more of this is becoming 'standard', but we're not to the point of universal
compatibility between distributions, and likely never will be.
> MontaVista said they do support floppies as a target, and generic images.
> Ray and I should have the new HardHat Linux 2.0 CD shortly. From what the
> rep. said it should be available for download too. On the down side, it
> looks like they are only making a subset of packages available for free.
:(
> http://www.mvista.com/products/hhl.html
This doesn't seem so bad. Folks can download and create their own free
development environment, and I doubt any of the extra platforms supported in
the $$$ edition would be required by anyone but a commercial developer, at
which point paying for a full-blown development environment is an
appropriate course of action. If we needed some of the professional stuff
(I think we'd mainly be interested in the additional packages), we could
probably get the HH guys to donate a few development systems.
In general, I have yet to see anything more suited to being a development
platform for us than HardHat. It targets embedded systems, and therefore
supports cross-compiling and multiple CPU architetures out of the box. The
embedded debian thing showed promise, but seems to be kind of dead at the
moment (I get an "anyone out there" e-mail from the embeddian list every
month or two). The embedded Red-Hat also looks kind of neat, but I think
the RH folks are trying to force folks to pay for the whole development
package...at least the HH guys have a free version (and really, how many
folks in our user base are going to be using the GUI based remote GDB
functionality anyway, which seems to be the main difference between the free
and $$$ versions).
Charles Steinkuehler
http://lrp.steinkuehler.net
http://c0wz.steinkuehler.net (lrp.c0wz.com mirror)
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