Reader love letters… passing information . . . MZ104, we want one now! . . . errata/erratum/erratinator.

Congrats on your Winter 2000 issue. I particularly liked the “Embedded Design with the MZ104” feature by Doug Stead and Shane Luttrell's “Trying Embedded Linux: Converting an Embedded DOS SONAR System to Linux”. You've taken a wonderfully practical and hands-on stance. The contest is a great lead-off. Bummer only every two months! I'd pay for this subscription.

Good luck,

—
Martin Crundall
[email protected]

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Excited and Delving

I Am Excited to See What's Next…

I am delving into microelectronics on my own at home, and never did I think I'd be able to build my own gear.

Keep up the good work; home enthusiasts like me need all the help we can get.

—
Mother
[email protected]

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How to Pass Information Between Shell Script and C Programs

I have read my Embedded Linux Journal from cover to cover and it's great!

I have been using the Lineo Embedix Linux SE that came free with their demo for about a week now. I have one question that maybe you can help me out with. It might even inspire you to write an article. Project SCADA: I want to use a script to enable two or three C programs to run in the background. These C programs will control slow I/O. The main program that is running in the foreground will communicate to these independent programs through global variables. I do not want to open and close files for communications. I would like to use global variables or some other method. How would one go about this?

—
Mark A. Fiore
[email protected]

Sounds like you might be able to do it with named pipes. Check out one of our favorite books, Linux Application Development, by Michael K. Johnson and Erik W. Troan. A web page about the book is at people.redhat.com/johnsonm/lad/contents.html and the ISBN is 0-201-30821-5. Watch embedded.linuxjournal.com for an embedded development forum where you can ask or answer questions like this one.

—
Editor

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Buy Your Own MZ104 Development Kit

You offer us a chance of winning an MZ104 board, but do not give us a chance of buying the same development kit! I'd really like to play with a system like this, but I have no specific ideas. Is there a way that we can buy the same kit that is offered as a prize?

—
Ian McAfee
[email protected]

We have contacted Doug Stead at Tri-M about making the kit available for sale. They are looking into it and expect to be able to offer it at a good price, to be announced at the same time as the 100 winners. The kits for purchase will also likely include a CD loaded with instructions. The BlueCat, or similar, component will have to be purchased directly from LynuxWorks, however.

—
Editor

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Errata for the November Embedded Linux Journal Supplement

• In Bruce Perens' article “Building Tiny Linux Systems with Busybox: Part 1”, Bruce writes that uC-Libc is licensed under the GPL. It is actually covered under the LGPL.
• In Phil Hughes' “Movie-on-Demand System”, he asks that project proposals be submitted by January 10, 2000. Rather than ask that proposals include time-travel capability, we will change the submission deadline to January 10, 2001.
• In the Resources section of Jan Schaumann's “Using Linux to Develop Software for the Palm OS” we mistakenly printed the URL to “The Palm OS Emulator HOWTO” as www.netmeister.org/palm/POSE_HOWTO.html. The correct URL is:

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