Sunnyvale, CA — (press release) — MontaVista Software, Inc., developer of the Hard Hat Linux operating system for embedded applications, today announced the appointment Gregory Haerr as the company's Chief Strategist, GUI Technologies. As the leader of the open source Microwindows Project, Haerr brings tremendous expertise in development and deployment of scalable GUIs and graphical APIs for mobile and… pervasive applications (see Microwindows article).

“Attracting Greg to the MontaVista team reflects our commitment to foster the outstanding talent in the Open Source community.” comments Jim Ready, industry pioneer and MontaVista president/CEO. “Greg's recognized success in embedding full-featured graphical windowing environments in small devices has had significant impact on the evolution of mobile and portable devices.”

Greg Haerr himself adds, “The rapidly-changing embedded systems market provides new opportunities and challenges in graphical systems implementations. Addressing developers' needs for a scalable GUI and tools is testimony to MontaVista's vision — to bring the power of Linux to embedded and pervasive computing. I am excited to join the clear leader, one dedicated to open source software and technical innovation.”

With more than twenty-four years of experience as a computer scientist, Haerr is also a specialist in operating systems, compiler and interpreter design, and communication protocols, with particular focus at his own company, Century Software, on connecting PCs to UNIX and IBM mainframes with legacy graphical interfaces. Haerr received a degree in Computer Science from the University of California at San Diego. In addition to heading up GUI technology development for MontaVista, Haerr will still maintain the open source Microwindows project and continue as CEO of Century Software in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Availability

The Microwindows GUI features both X.11 APIs (Nano-X) and a full-featured Win32/WindowsCE subset API to control the underlying Nano-GUI engine, which fits into a scant 225 Kbytes. Many desktop and pervasive computing applications have already been ported to Microwindows, including the Opera web browser and even the KDE desktop. Accompanying Microwindows is a powerful prototyping tool that lets embedded Linux developers emulate their target graphical device in terms of pixel count, bit depth, and color palette in a window on their X.11-based Linux desktop.

Versions of Microwindows are currently available for embedded PowerPC, x86/Pentium, StrongARM, and NEC MIPS processor architectures, with drivers for a range of graphics hardware devices. Microwindows will be integrated in the MontaVista Hard Hat Linux Cross Development Kit (CDK) version 2.0 due out later this Summer.

For more information about Microwindows, visit the Microwindows open source project web site, at www.microwindows.org.

Related stories:
Linux + Microwindows: challenger to WinCE
Enabling embedded Linux graphical applications
The Microwindows and NanoGUI Projects
Display connectivity solution for embedded Linux devices

 
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