MontaVista Software will today unveil a free 'Preview Kit' which lets embedded system developers evaluate the capabilities of the company's embedded Linux distribution and tool suite in advance of making a purchase commitment. The free kit demonstrates several key packages and technologies included in MontaVista Linux Professional Edition 2.1, and includes a full MontaVista Linux kernel which runs on a… range of popular reference platforms spanning eleven processors from six architecture families (further detailed below). Sufficient software, tools, and documentation are included to allow a developer to do “a little bit of work with it”, according to MontaVista product manager, Jacob Lehrbaum.

Using the various tools and software components included in the kit, developers can explore the MontaVista Linux build/debug process and can evaluate the product's networking and real-time performance. The kit offers a hands-on preview of MontaVista's cross-platform embedded application development environment, and demonstrates the same network-based development environment as is used with the full MontaVista Linux Professional Edition (including components such as DHCP, NFS and tftp). Also included, are a sampling of board support packages (which MontaVista calls LSPs, for 'Linux Support Packages') for a range of popular reference platforms, along with representative documentation to simplify the evalution process. In addition, the kit includes several demonstrations which explain the features and benefits of MontaVista Linux Professional Edition 2.1, and how it is used.

Here are some further details on what is supplied in the Preview Kit . . .

• Target Boards Supported — Generic x86; Malta (little and big endian); Embedded Planet Linux Planet; Motorola Sandpoint 750, 7450, 8240; ADS Graphics Card Plus; Intrinsyc Cerfboard; ARM 920/720T; Hitachi Solution Engine 7751
• Development Hosts Supported — Red Hat 7.2; Mandrake 8.1; SuSE 7.3
• Basic System Components — Basic Linux commands (busybox); Login utility (tinylogin); Initscripts; glibc
• Networking Components — Web server (thttpd); Telnet server (telnetd); Security/Access (inetd); DHCP Client; tftp Client
• Full cross-hosted toolchain — Cross gcc, ar, as, ld; Cross binutils objdump, objcopy, size; Cross gdb; glibc
• Montavista Linux 2.1 kernel features — Preemptible Kernel; Real-Time Scheduler; NFS filesystem; TCP/IP family; thttp webserver

The Preview Kit will be available for free download late in the day on August 21, 2002, here.

 
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