In light of my recent decision to abandon waiting for Butterfly, I am taking
a long, hard look at working with Monta-Vista's Hard-Hat linux. I think
this would make an excellent base distribution for the next generation of
internet appliance releases.
Of course, the proof is in the pudding (or so they say), so I'm downloading
their (free) Journeyman release to play with. I've also e-mailed the
HardHat linux folks, to see if they have any interest in a project like LEAF
using their distribution. While I don't think we currently need sponsership
from Monta-Vista, an alliance (or similar) might be nice. It would at least
be good to know things like if they plan on keeping a free development
platform available, be informed of major upcoming changes to the
distribution ahead of time, and similar.
Another benefit of using something like HardHat is multi-processor support.
This will mean absolutely nothing to 99.999% of our users, but several folks
are embedding LRP into 'black boxes' which may or may not run an Intel
architecture CPU. I personally would LOVE to play with something like
HardHat on the new IBM NPe405 CPU with 4 built-in 10/100 ethernet ports and
multiple T1/E1 support. That would make a pretty cool LEAF platform...
NOTE: I'm still very open to suggestions on what to use as the base of the
next generation of LRP like functionality. I'm mainly looking at starting
with an existing distribution because 'out of the box' you get a working
cross-compile environment (no more dedicated Debian Slink boxes just to
compile an application or two), and much of the software will be
pre-packaged. While the pre-packaged stuff will likely be in RPM format, it
should be possible to easily convert the RPM's to a tar.gz file or something
else shell-scripts can deal with. A lot of the hard work (that requires
maintainence and debugging) goes into making sure the packages all work well
together...we should be able to leverage this work from a mainstream
distribution and speed our "time to solution". I really don't want to try
to create or maintain a complete, from the ground up distribution...it seems
like too much duplication of existing work.
Thoughts/commments welcome, as always
Charles Steinkuehler
http://lrp.steinkuehler.net
http://c0wz.steinkuehler.net (lrp.c0wz.com mirror)
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