Overall assessment

It is somewhat difficult to identify the market for MontaVista's Hard Hat Linux. The primary commercial potential for an embedded Linux distribution is to target new Linux users, or those who simply want a toolkit that will handle the details of installation and deployment, allowing them to concentrate on their application development. Hard core Linux users are likely to cook up their own distribution from freely available sources, so a commercial toolkit had better focus on user friendliness and good documentation in order to target the rest of the market.

The commercial RTOS products could serve as a useful model for how to design an embedded Linux toolkit. They make no assumptions about the user's prior knowledge of their products — there are no hard core VxWorks hackers, only developers with a problem that VxWorks may solve. These users expect to find all of the tools and documentation they need within the package. If commercial Linux distributors expect to get some of that market, they must take the same approach, providing a complete, comprehensive, and well documented solution. The current Hard Hat release falls short in several respects.

MontaVista has long prided itself on its “100% open source, royalty free” policy, and indeed Hard Hat is admirably open, with only TCT released under a conventional EULA (end user license agreement). In any case, with Hard Hat there is no question of making royalty payments as any system generated with it can be freely distributed. This is most certainly perceived as a major advantage by many — if not most — embedded system developers.

In my opinion, MontaVista should emphasize a few specific issues for a future Hard Hat release . . .

• First, TCT should perform some significant dependency checking, refusing to build an inconsistent system.

• Second, Hard Hat should provide deployment options, including at least target deployment from floppy disks and a CD-ROM.

• Finally, the manual should explain the entire process in full detail, assuming at most a very basic user's understanding of Linux.

If MontaVista can accomplish these without sacrificing their Linux kernel expertise, Hard Hat Linux could well be a product to rival any Linux-based or proprietary system on the market.

— The end —

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Story navigation . . .

• Part 1: First impressions
  
• Part 2: Getting started
  
• Part 3: Cross-development
  
• Part 4: GUI-based Target Configuration Tool
  
• Part 5: Other observations
  
• Part 6: Overall assessment

Be sure to read all the articles in this series . . .

• A developer's review of the leading Embedded Linux toolkits
  
• A developer's review of Lineo's Embedix SDK
  
• A developer's review of MontaVista's Hard Hat Linux SDK
  
• A developer's review of Red Hat's Embedded Linux Developer Suite
  
• A developer's review of LynuxWorks' BlueCat Linux SDK
  
• A developer's review of REDSonic's RED-Builder Embedded Linux toolkit

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About the author: Jerry Epplin has written embedded software for the past fifteen years, primarily for medical devices. He can be reached at [email protected]

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This article was originally published on LinuxDevices.com and has been donated to the open source community by QuinStreet Inc. Please visit LinuxToday.com for up-to-date news and articles about Linux and open source.