Version 3.0 of SnapGear Embedded Linux, based on Linux kernel 2.6, is now available for free download. The latest SnapGear security-oriented embedded Linux distribution is claimed to be the “world’s first production Linux system powered by the 2.6 kernel” — but is also a watershed release in that for the first time, commercial developers can use a stable Linux kernel distribution, without patching, to build deeply embedded systems on devices without a memory management unit (MMU).
SnapGear Embedded Linux Distro Boasts 2.6 kernel, Merged uClinux
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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heh 2.6 isnt even out yet. they must have delorian. i am guessing as linux gets popular people will do things like this so it ends up looking good for marketing plans etc. bleh i want far far away from that kind of crap.
What is contained in their distro? Is it just a kernel and some tools.
http://snapgear.org/downloads.html
Or can you install it on a desktop x86 computer and get PDA like functionality?
I have always wanted to try a distro that is a PDA OS on a desktop system. I have always wanted to see if it is faster than KDE and GNOME and their respective slow loading apps.
Oh well I can always hope, or get the skills to do it myself.
It appears to only be a kernel and some tools. Of course, this is no small feat, considering the range of platforms it apparently runs on, but there doesn’t seem to be much else.
As for the “run a PDA OS on my desktop” comment: you could. I believe that you can make Qtopia do it.
However, it’s not like you’re just a hop, skip, and recompile away from running everything on your PDA-like desktop. Qtopia/Opie, for instance, runs in a framebuffer, meaning that you’ll have to do some hacking to fix the apps to work with that. AND, of course, GPE and Opie don’t ship with standard Qt and GTK+ libs – you’ll need to mod your programs for those, too.
There’s also the little issue that Opie/GPE are optimized for small touchscreens, whereas your monitor is probably a large CRT. It just won’t function all that well for desktop usage. Take, for example, XMMS-E. It takes up _the whole screen_. Do you really want that? Stuff like qpe-gaim isn’t much better, either – a nightmare to use compared to the regular versions.
Finally, the reason PDA apps always seem to load faster is because they’re: 1) in RAM or 2) smaller, less functional versions of the desktop apps. Of course Evo is going to take longer than “todolist” to load. Big and functional apps need more load time. Fact of life.
So, ditch the PDA idea, and just dig into the Qt and GTK+ source code looking for places to speed things up. A couple good fixes could make a serious difference.
-Erwos
when the usb 2.0 pen drives get to 4GB capacity, the embedded linux systems will be full-featured installs.
There are some at 2GB now.
A look at the changes made between 2.4 kernel and 2.6 kernel
shows that a LOT of dedicated programmers are trying to make
a good ,stable code base for non-programmers to use.
Thanks for the info Erwos.