Thoughts on ELinOS?

Hmm. I would not call it a development kit (like an IDE). I think it's more a "distribution generator"

I did not use the latest version. I found it working very well. But since there are _many_ ways to set up your embedded distribution, it out of the box (of course) did not cover everything I wanted to do (e.g. remote booting via Ethernet). So I needed do do a lot of extensions to ELinOS. While this is very well possible, the documentation on how to do this is lacking. The people supporting it were very knowledgeable and helpful, but of course regarding the very low price of the product, they needed to limit the amount of support given. So be prepared to buy additional support from them once you need to do special unexpected things.

Definitely. Once I can restart the Linux project I was doing some time ago using ELinOS, I'll upgrade to the latest version.

-Michael

Hi: We have used ELINOS to bring an AMD520 PC104 board into operation with ELINOS 2.1 (previous version). We started with some Unix but limited Linux experience, and were able to produce the kernel variant which we needed in a very short time. We found the ELK tool also to be useful as a learning aid for understanding the kernel options and file system. It was relatively straightforward to use standard Linux config and make scripts in the ELINOS cross-development environment to add functionality such as ssl/ssh.

I agree fully with M. Schnell's assessment for kernel level extensions. Another possible problem is that while the (2.1) distribution is very close to standard

2.4.18, the differences are not documented (for the low-price version, at least) which gives something of a black-box or cat in the bag effect for people who are not Linux kernel experts. For PC104 this is potentially a problem when using non-GPLed drivers for commercial add-on cards. Our experience has been fairly positive, ie drivers compiled for 2.4.18 (or nearby versions) have worked.

S. Herb

Thanks for the information. Steve your hardware is similar to ours, we're using a PC/104 board from Parvus with the same AMD SC520 CPU. I wasn't aware that ELinOS has modified the standard Linux kernel? Can you elaborate on this?

Thanks again,

Mark

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[Disclaimer: It's been a while since I was actively involved in the ELinOS product development, so I may not be 100% up to date here...]

ELinOS comes with a kernel that has been derived from a standard kernel.org version. All modifications can be easily seen by "diff"ing it against the corresponding version from kernel.org. The modifications are generally to add certain features that are desirable in an embedded context, for example:

- RTAI patch (real-time Linux, see rtai.org) - Support for remote kernel debugging - Tar extract support (for initializing a RAMdisk from a .tgz image) - some fixes specific to the AMD Elan (at least, these used to be in the Elinos kernel at some point. I believe meanwhile they are in the standard kernel) - ...

All those patches are available somewhere on the 'net, but applying them "by hand" can be a daunting task, especially for newbies. Furthermore, ElinOS allows to replace the modified kernel with a standard one, it's just that those nice features aren't available then.

Hope this helps

Rob

--
Robert Kaiser                     email: rkaiser AT sysgo DOT com
SYSGO AG                          http://www.elinos.com
Klein-Winternheim / Germany       http://www.sysgo.com

Can you provide a link for a how-to ... how to replace the modified kernel with a standard one?

Thomas