Lineo Inc. today announced formation of the Lineo Industrial Solutions Group. The new Lineo unit, based primarily on the company's recent Zentropix acquisition, is chartered to focus on markets requiring real-time OS support, such as industrial control, military, and streaming media applications. Jim Norton, former CEO of Zentropix, has been named General Manager of the new Industrial Solutions Group. Through this move, Lineo is clearly signaling its intention to go head-to-head with RTOS leader Wind River Systems as well as fellow embedded Linux players MontaVista and LynuxWorks.

Zentropix was one of the earliest commercial players in the embedded Linux market and has been in the forefront of real-time Linux solutions development since 1998. The company initially supported RTLinux, the most popular real-time Linux implementation, but over the past six months has shifted its attention primarily to RTAI. During that time, Zentropix has contributed numerous features, services, and enhancements to RTAI, including POSIX, dynamic memory allocation, fifo, and the /proc interface.

According to Norton, “hard real time operation is a common requirement for mission critical applications such as those encountered in the military and industrial control sectors, but is also required by many non-industrial streaming media applications.”

The Lineo Industrial Solutions Group will be based in Reston, Va., at the former Zentropix location, and will closely coordinate its real-time Linux development projects with Paolo Mantegazza, RTAI system architect and project leader, to provide additional enhancements to RTAI. Mantegazza is a professor at the Department of Aerospace Engineering of Milan, Italy (DIAPM).

Related stories:
Lineo Acquires Zentropix
Perl bindings simplify real-time Linux API
Real-Time Application Interface (RTAI) v1.3 released
New RealTime Linux Install CD Includes RTLinux + RTAI

 
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