Monta Vista for embedded development

We've made the decision to go with MV Linux in our PPC based project. I'll let you know in a couple of months how it's going. ;-)

-->Neil

Hi. My experience with MontaVista was not good. I found myself looking for where the value came from in the relationship. Most of the software they supply you can get for free (though they applied some customization to the kernel), and their installer is very prone to crashing. We installed it on 5 different machines under windows

2000, redhat 7.3 and redhat 9.0 and it usually took 3 to 5 tries. Their windows version installs its own cygwin and will not co-operate with an existing cygwin installation. The GUI requires a LOT of memory and is slow. (I think it was 15 mintes to create a new project on a 256MB machine. Upgrade to 512MB reduced to 7 minutes to just create a project.) We were trying to apply MVL to our custom in-house board and their support people were lost when we wanted to know about kernel internals. I expect they are much better when you want support applying the kernel to one of the reference boards they have in-house. We made enough of a stink about this that they are even now overhauling their support methods, so maybe future reports will be better.

This is quite comparable to my own experience. I think MV has configured itself as a resource for "newbies". They probably do a decent job at that. But, if you only need to contact them when something is really broken, then you will likely be very disappointed when such a need arises.

I suspect that you are right. Admittedly, I've never been told that they won't support something custom, but I have occasionally gotten an "it works fine on the reference board" response to a problem found on a custom board. In my section of the industry, almost everything is some form of custom board. So, support targeted at reference boards is essentially no support at all.

Just my $0.02...YMMV...etc...

John

--
John W. Linville
linville@tuxdriver.com

If you don't care the money and want something that runs on the reference boards that they support, then go for it. What they have done is to customized the port to the reference boards. The support for the money you paid is only through e-mail. When you have a problem with the kernel, a lot of time you will not get the support you want, because they are not the developers and they just like you start to read and learn the code.

Hello, rob! You wrote on Tue, 25 May 2004 19:49:46 GMT:

You mentioned "they are not developers".... You mean MVista team just modify the kernel sources for vaious reference boards? Or time to time they hire some develkopers from open-source community for developing drivers/porting etc. ? Could you please explain a little this moment, as it's very important.....

So, it seems MVista has a lot of disadvantages at all....

??>> Is there anybody here who was/is developing with Monta Vista Linux ??>> distribution? ??>> Could you please express your opinions, estimate this product etc. ??>>

??>> Is it worth of buying ? I know MV supports a variety of ??>> developement boards, CPU families, they have pretty much good IDE, a ??>> lot of drivers for exotic H/W and so on..... That's all I know 'bout ??>> it :) I've already visited web-site of MV and have read all related ??>> to distribution, but I'd like to hear the concrete impressions of it ??>> by developers. Thanks in advance! With best regards, Roman Mashak. ??>> E-mail: snipped-for-privacy@tusur.ru

With best regards, Roman Mashak. E-mail: snipped-for-privacy@tusur.ru