Is here anybody working with embedded Linux

i wanna learn something about ARM+Linux.
it's a very popular tech recently.
so i wanna know some friends knowing it

thanks much for your reply
i'm new here and a beginner of ARM & linux
The hardware might belongs to the ARM9 seires
i've got none link to hardware specialists
i may finish reading a book related the tech,and the discuss technical things with specs such as you

MrLinux made a great suggestion It's a lot easier, less expensive and less time consuming to learn Linux on a desktop PC before moving to embedded systems which can be a lot more challenging.

feifeivictor where are you from?

Man, at my job and in my embedded systems classes, I would KILL to have 128MB of RAM! The system I am working on at school only has 2KB (not MB!) of RAM. At school we use the Freescale MC9s12C32 chip and at work I used a Rabbit 4000 processor. However, all the embedded systems programming that I did was strictly programming bare metal (i.e. no Operating system). Another way that you could look at is was that I was basically making a very specialized operating system for the embedded microprocessors that would only do one thing (such as record sound and play it back).

Embedded programming is fun, but it is an entirely different beast from programming for a PC with an OS that takes care of things for you (such as having stdin for printing messages and a filesystem for storing data).

It will take you some time to learn to program with such constraints, but I think it will make you a better programmer for it as you will better understand the capabilities of the machines you are programming as well as its limits.

-Zorak

It's important to note that there are various versions of the ARM processor.

To run Linux you should look at the Xscale / ARMv5TE series or higher.

You can run ucLinux on AVR32 CPUs also and other MCUs ( Altera NIOS, ADI Blackfin, ARM, ETRAX, Freescale m68k, Fujitsu FR-V, Hitachi H8, Intel i960, MIPS, NEC V850E, Xilinx MicroBlaze $src=wiki ) but there are many restrictions on what you can do.

There is a huge difference between AVR ( 8 bit ), PIC, 8051 and other MCUs when compared to architectures that can run a full fledged linux distribution ( not ucLinux ).

You need lots of MIPS and lots of RAM to run a full fledged linux distribution, 2KB is obviously not enough.

It's also worth looking at eCos and FreeRTOS, both are free modular real-time operating systems aimed at smaller systems.

There is currently a growing interest in Embedded BSD; BSD has a well earned reputation for stability and security, the embedded version is often used for remotely controller network devices (FireWalls, Routers, Servers etc.).

If you want to see what is happening in the Embedded Linux market, have a look at linuxdevices.com

linuxdevices is cool, I check it daily [ fixed typo ]

If you want a cheap 8bit low end MCU check out AVR / AVR8. It won't run Linux or ucLinux but it's programmable with avr-gcc.

The bare chips sell for $2.39 each if you buy 100.

AVR32 can run ucLinux but it's not as good as ARM @600MHz with 256MB running ucLinux or a full fledged Linux distro.

If you want to learn desktop / server Linux fedora 10 and ubuntu 8.10 are both great for that

You can dual boot fedora 10 and ubuntu 8.10 or you can make Virtual Machines for them.

I recommend running Linux as the host OS and running Virtual Machines on top of it using Virtualbox, VMWare, QEMU, Xen or KVM.

I'd be interested to see just what can be picked up in China and for what sort of money. There have to be some OEM bargains to be had over there.

Makes me wonder if a Pandora II is actually something of a bargain over here.