San Francisco; LinuxWorld — (press release excerpt) — MontaVista Software Inc. today launched a two-pronged graphics strategy that offers embedded developers using the company's flagship product, Hard Hat Linux (HHL) 2.0 Professional Edition, a choice of two industry-leading graphics development environments.

Hard Hat Graphics (HHG), the first full graphics add-on product for Hard Hat Linux, and the Qt/Embedded graphics toolkit from Trolltech, Inc. are now available from MontaVista, with customer shipments commencing in September. Both are on display at in MontaVista's booth at LinuxWorld.

Hard Hat Graphics is a high-end, open source environment for building state-of-the-art, graphics-based applications for embedded devices. HHG incorporates Tiny X (a small footprint version of the X 11 Window system); GTK+, a multi-platform graphics toolkit designed for the X Window system; Glade, a Graphical User Interface (GUI) builder for GTK+ and the IceWM window manager, a small, lightweight window manager for the X Window system. As a foundation for future designs, HHG also provides an extensible multimedia platform for developing the next generation of digital multimedia devices.

For the growing number of developers familiar with Trolltech's popular toolkit, MontaVista delivers Qt/Embedded for HHL, a package designed and tested to work with Hard Hat Linux. This industry-leading graphics toolkit, optimized for embedded Linux, includes the Qt/Embedded GUI development environment and QPE-Qt Palmtop environment, along with Qt Designer, a full-function GUI builder, and the newly released Qt Linguist, which provides international language translation.

“Embedded Linux has been gaining market share extremely rapidly, despite a lack of clear consensus on GUI and windowing APIs,” said Rick Lehrbaum, founder and executive editor of ZDNet's popular LinuxDevices.com embedded Linux website. “By focusing their resources on two highly popular standards-based graphical architectures — Tiny-X/GTK and Qt/Embedded — MontaVista is encouraging a trend that is likely to accelerate the impending dominance of Embedded Linux. Together, these two options give developers a high degree of flexibility and choice, in terms of licensing model, software architecture, and programming language.”

“MontaVista continues to enhance its core offerings with quality upgrades and 'best in class' add-on products,” said Michael Mathews, product manager at MontaVista. “Hard Hat Graphics is a high performance graphics environment while Qt/Embedded for Hard Hat Linux is a powerful graphics toolkit. These offerings provide embedded developers the flexible graphical building blocks they need for a broad range of applications, including telematics, set-top boxes, instrumentation, Internet appliances and industrial control.”

Both offerings will help developers create and deliver powerful graphics-based applications for Hard Hat Linux. Both are extensible and modular, provide access to source code, and are scalable to meet the “right-sizing” requirements for today's embedded devices.

Hard Hat Graphics is available now directly from MontaVista to subscribers of the Hard Hat Linux 2.0 Professional Edition. Qt/Embedded for HHL is also available immediately to subscribers as a separate add-on product that will be royalty bearing for deployment.

 
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.