On Tue Mar 21, 2000 at 12:35:21PM -0600, Dave New wrote:
>
> Having said that, there are some current players out there,
> Lineo Embedix being one that I know of. They have a 1.0 release,
> based on Caldera, that you can download to try out. It's
> still kinda' raw, but the basic stuff is there, and it
> has a nice, small footprint. Lineo promises to have
> more sophisticated development and configuration tools
> out 'real soon now', but just like the above, I wouldn't
> hold my breath. They do have a reasonable 84-page PDF
> file that describes how the distro is put together, though.
> Looking through that should give you an idea of how you
> could extend and/or embed the system.
<disclaimer -- Not speaking for Lineo>
In practice, Embedix is based on Caldera only when being based on Caldera makes
sense for an embedded system. You will find that the Embedix base system has
very little in common with Caldera. The Caldera stuff really only applies to
optional packages. The base system relies on BusyBox for most things (BusyBox
is GPLed and maintained by me -- website at http://busybox.lineo.com), and it
uses library reduction to trim down the shared libraries to an absolute
minimum. You can put an awful lot of Linux in a very small footprint this way.
The upcoming Software Development Kit (SDK) will allow you to select the exact
components you want in your embedded distribution. It automagically handles
all the dependencies (so if you enable the "ping" application, it will
automagically make sure that for the target image it is building that libc will
be compiled with libresolv and libnss_dns, that /etc/nsswitch.conf will be set
up properly with "hosts" and "networks" entries, and that the kernel will be
compiled with ipv4 support and it will flag you that some type of networking
driver (ppp, an ethernet driver, whatever) is required for a working system.
That saves tons of time and lets folks hand roll an embedded Linux that exactly
suits their needs (rather then making do with a one-size-fits-all). When you
hit "go" the SDK compiles up the whole thing from source and builds you a
bootable image that is ready to go. And it allows you to perform easy
configuration management on your images, so you can go back and rebuild your
XP-37rev4 image 6 months later and apply one bug fix and be sure that nothing
else has changed in the image. It is already pretty slick to use (but not
quite ready for release yet -- a couple more weeks till we release it to the
test department (hopefully they won't find too many bugs ;-) ).
</disclaimer>
hope this helps,
-Erik
--
Erik B. Andersen Web: http://www.xmission.com/~andersen/
email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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