Qplus, An Open Source Embedded Linux Toolkit

An anonymous reader writes "In this article at LinuxDevices.com, Jerry Epplin takes a detailed look Qplus, an open source embedded Linux toolkit, examining what the project has accomplished -- and what is still to be done. Epplin concludes that "...The introduction of Qplus is certain to be a welcome development for developers who have been hoping for a pure open source embedded Linux toolkit. It is already an impressively capable kit, with suitably ambitious goals and a well-designed infrastructure to achieve them.""

Info for embedded Linux for the hobbyist/newbie?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been thinking about getting started in embedded Linux, with the end goal of creating simple devices (little robots or whatever).

Searching Google for "embedded linux" and similar turns up alot of hits, but most are about as useful as searching for "c"

It seems like most of what I can find is either information about what devices (SBCs, etc) you can run one of the embedded linux distros on (for example, LinuxDevices [linuxdevices.com] mentioned in the article seems to focus on this) or assumes you're already an embedded Linux expert and can hack a kernel like Linus himself.

I've been thinking about buying something like uCsimm [uclinux.org] to play around with, but without being able to find any "getting started" type info, I'm concerned it would just be a waste of money.

So my question is, what are the good resources out there with introductory level coverage of embedded Linux such that some of us might eventually be able to use this fine toolkit? If anyone has any links I'd really appreciate some pointers.

Where does this come from, exactly?

[Otter]

I'm surprised to that such a serious looking project emerged from such a mysterious source. If I correctly understand the article and the results of some Googling, there's only a (soon to be Slashdotted) FTP archive containing the code and some PDFs that I can't open, apparently due to Korean character issues.

Is this project Qt based? The screenshots seem to be from KDE 1.x.

Re:Where does this come from, exactly?

[Anonymous Coward]

regarding the unopenable PDFs, try using xpdf instead of acroread. I had trouble reading the doc pdf with acroread but it worked with xpdf.

DIY solutions

[david.given]

Making an embedded Linux is easy --- fundamentally it consists of three binaries: the kernel, ash, and busybox.

Unfortunately, when you add functionality it gets real complicated real quick. I tried putting together a turnkey Mozilla distro with an embedded Linux, KDrive X, and Mozilla. Did it work? Did it hell. Mozilla would just hang on startup, waiting for some service that wasn't there. I spent ages trying to find out why and eventually had to give up.

I haven't looked closely at QPlus, because it's in Korea and is Slashdotted out of its tiny mind. What I'd really like is a source-based system, where I can just type 'make' in the top level and it will rebuild everything I'm using, libc and all. Unfortunately the review talks about RPMs, so I suspect it isn't.

Has anyone here actually used QPlus and can comment on it?

Re:DIY solutions

[Anonymous Coward]

"fundamentally it consists of three binaries: the kernel, ash, and busybox."

Ash is supported internally within busybox :)

Re:DIY solutions

[nesthigh]

You might be interested in midori linux [sf.net] by Transmetta.It uses a web based configurator, and builds from source.It's been a while since it's been updated, but lately the CVS has been quite active.This is probably due to the flurry of tablet PCs using the transmetta chips.

next

Re:DIY solutions

[j_kenpo]

"Unfortunately, when you add functionality it gets real complicated real quick. I tried putting together a turnkey Mozilla distro with an embedded Linux, KDrive X, and Mozilla. Did it work? Did it hell. Mozilla would just hang on startup, waiting for some service that wasn't there. I spent ages trying to find out why and eventually had to give up. "

Interesting, I was trying to do something similar, but without X. I was using a few other Linux based GUIs, and the one I went with was an embedded GTK add on for GTK 2.0 without X. In the end I gave up and went with FreeDos with Arachne since it booted way faster out of the box, and it did exactly what I wanted.

it does what it says it does

[wolske]

from what I've seen... I installed it and set up a project -- it spit out a root file system and a kernel.

what I'm stuck on is how to utilize what it created. I don't know if I can launch it in bochs/vmware, or how I can roll it up into a binary file and flash it to the platform I want to use (and will undoubtably break in the process).

I have a AMIT based broadband router, and basically I want to roll my own router/pf/nat on it.