Anton
Remember the old quote about open source? It is only free if your time is also free
What you say is true, and embedded Linux is almost certainly the best choice for what Mike needs, but I for one would feel better about agreeing with you if you weren’t chronically a wet blanket about everything but. You are clearly an individual with a plus IQ, but you should give us all some credit too
Sent from Surface Pro
From: xxxxx@hotmail.com
Sent: Tuesday, March 17, 2015 9:23 PM
To: Windows System Software Devs Interest List
Mike,
To be honest, I don’t really understand what you are up to. If you just want to do Linux embedded you don’t really need a Linux host. What you need is, first, an emulator of your target platform, and, second, a toolchain (which,at the very minimum, includes an assembler, a compiler and a debugger for your target architecture). One can be almost certain that you will be provided with all of the above mentioned things(apparently, as parts of a full-fledged IDE), as well as with pre-built embedded Linux image and a set of development libraries, headers and samples, by your development board vendor. You will be given an option of your host system, so that you will be able to get your IDE for Windows or Mac if you wish, and,hence, do all your embedded Linux development on your Windows machine. Judging from what you say, this is exactly what you need. If you want something a bit more than that…well, more on it below.
I am hoping Linux is the way to go
Correct…
Linux is, indeed, the best possible option for any technically-minded person. Why? Simply because you immediately get an access to a plethora of free development tools that you can use, weak and modify as you wish . For example, in your particular case you may want to build your own toolchain,
to launch your own Linux distro from the scratch, or to extend QUEMU and add a support to some piece of hardware that does not yet exist( because you are about to design it) to it, or even try some new architecture that you are about to launch. In the latter case simply building your toolchain will not suffice, for understandable reasons - you will have to port it to your architecture. In other words, everything depends on your objectives - you will be able to find an approach that best suits your particular needs and your available timeframe.
This is not limited to software development. For example, you will get an access to a suit of free
electronics development tools (both digital electronics tools like Icarus Verilog and analogue ones like GEDA suit),as well as NGSPICE simulator. The latter one is a particularly powerful tool that allows you to go as far as running a mixed-signal simulation (with some rather convoluted steps, I admit). However, proprietary “easy-to-use” SPICEs that target only Windows hosts and don’t require steps like that are going to cost you many thousands USD a year per seat, while NGSPICE is absolutely free…
Sure you can build and install at least some of open-source tools under Windows as well. However, the available choice and overall flexibility that Linux offers just cannot be compared to that Windows. You have to try it - you are going to see it yourself…
Anton Bassov
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consider Virtual PC or Hyper-V