Linux is famous for coming with a large toolbox and good ways to integrate tools. Peter Seebach discusses how new tools are developed and how to make a one-off program into a utility you'll be using for years to come. (more…)

Foreword — This whitepaper is the second in a series from TimeSys's “2.6 Linux Resource Center” on using the new Linux 2.6 kernel. Authored by TimeSys Senior Product Manager William von Hagen, the whitepapers in this series place special emphasis on the primary issues in migrating existing drivers, applications, and embedded Linux deployments to a Linux distribution based on the 2.6 kernel. (more…)

The Eclipse Platform, which provides a very powerful Integrated Development Environment (IDE), includes its own help system based on an XML table-of-contents referencing HTML files. What isn't immediately obvious is that you don't have to write Eclipse plug-ins to use it. Any project can use a cut-down version of the platform to provide professional, easy-to-use, and searchable documentation. (more…)

Foreword: This interview with Yoshinobu Ushiyama, CEO of Lineo Solutions, is the third in LinuxDevices.com's CEO/CTO interview series. It addresses the growing momentum behind Linux in the Consumer Electronics (CE) market, and how the CE Linux Forum (CELF) can unify the market. (more…)

The SCO licensing campaign — which has been all bark and no bite since its introduction by way of threatening letters to the Fortune 1500 last summer — lost a wheel last month, and is now headed for the wall. (more…)

Foreword — This whitepaper is the first in a series from TimeSys's”2.6 Linux Resource Center” on using the new Linux 2.6 kernel. Authored by TimeSys Senior Product Manager William von Hagen, the whitepapers in this series place special emphasis on the primary issues in migrating existing drivers, applications, and embedded Linux deployments to a Linux distribution based on the 2.6 kernel. (more…)

This interview with Dr. Inder Singh, CEO of LynuxWorks, is the second in LinuxDevices.com's CEO/CTO interview series. It addresses the emergence of Linux as a standard the embedded industry can unite around, real-time performance in the 2.6 kernel, how LynuxWorks is prepared to respond to copyright infringement… (more…)

This article explains how to install Debian Linux on a Lippert Thunderbird mini-ITX motherboard based on a Pentium-M processor. Though not specifically an embedded project, it does involve a form-factor — mini-ITX — that's increasingly popular with embedded device and system developers. (more…)

Foreword: The following open letter to the EE Times responds to this editorial by Green Hills Software CEO Dan O'Dowd, in which O'Dowd denies the existence of a market for embedded Linux development tools. (more…)

This LinuxDevices.com guide to mini-ITX motherboards in the world of embedded Linux provides an introduction to mini-ITX and aggregates news stories, project features, board announcements, and more. Read each article and follow the emergence of mini-ITX as one of the key form-factors for embedded Linux based products and projects! (more…)

Below is a brief interview with Stewart Hall, principal developer of the Linux-based Mission Control Software and Mission Planning Software for the European Beagle-2 Mars lander project (B2MCS and B2MPS, respectively). (more…)

The “real time interrupt patch” (rtirq-patch) described in this document enables the linux kernel for hard-real-time applications by adding priorities to interrupts and spinlocks. (more…)

All too often, checking the README of a package yields only the none-too-specific “Build Instructions: Run configure, then run make.” But what about when that doesn't work? In this article, Peter Seebach discusses what to do when an automatic configuration script doesn't work — and what you can do as a developer to keep failures to a minimum. (more…)

It was twenty years ago today that I quit my job at MIT to begin developing a free software operating system, GNU. While we have never released a complete GNU system suitable for production use, a variant of the GNU system is now used by tens of millions of people who mostly are not aware it is such. (more…)

Industrial Embedded Systems (INES), a project to promote the adoption of Open Source software funded by the European Union (EU), has begun publishing a collection of papers and presentations on the use of embedded Linux in the “real world.” (more…)