Index

Linux links page

    General

    Linux is a free, open-source operating system developed by Linus Torvalds, a Finnish programmer, and a team of enthusiasts. The appeal of Linux is clear. It is free, unlike such rival operating systems as Microsoft's Windows and Sun's Solaris. And it runs on almost any computer, providing compatibility, flexibility and further cost savings. Linux is used mostly to run servers, the back-office machines that handle e-mail, web pages, file sharing, and printing. Several Linux boxes can also be "clustered" together to create cheaply a machine with the power of a supercomputer. The rise of Linux is changing the dynamics of the computer business. Some of the industry's titans benefit from its advance, while others lose. As result it might be dividing the industry into winners that offer Linux (e.g. IBM and HP), and losers that don't, (e.g. Microsoft). To consumers, Linux may rank third after Windows and Macintosh, but Linux dominates in some industried (dominateds in motion picturesmaking, has captured a third of the ISP server market).The big problem with Linux is that it is very difficult to get into from thebeginning for very many people. Once sorted and working it really is smooth, reliable and a pleasure to use. There are loads of little things like that which prevent Linux from taking off and it really is a great pity. They are all small things that can be answered by searching onthe net or asking on usenet, Linux users are really helpful when it comes tosorting people out but it takes a lot of time. Usually you need to understand 90% of the picture before you can fix the 10%that's not working is a big turnoff. In my experience the graphicalconfigurators are only half baked (cos no serious Linux head ever usesthem, so they never get properly tested) and so you have to manually edit. Unfortunately nowadays nobody in the engineering field can economically do everything in Linux, due to the sheer volumeof Win32 stuff that works just fine. LInux can be a very good platform to different special systems. Contrary to common sense, to build the best secret proprietary software you need an open-source platform underneath it. The reason is that proprietary software can require tweaks to the operating system itself that no proprietary operating system vendor would be interested in implementing.

    Linux distributions

    • Ark Linux - Ark Linux is a Linux distribution designed especially for desktop use, primarily for people without prior Linux experience. Its main goal is ease of use, and the inclusion of many tools end users will need.    Rate this link
    • Coyote Linux - a single floppy distribution of Linux designed for use by those wishing to share an Internet connection that is provided via an Ethernet connection using DHCP or PPPoE, or a PPP dial-up with other computers that are connected to a local area network (LAN)    Rate this link
    • Debian Gnu/Linux    Rate this link
    • DemoLinux - The DemoLinux CD allow to use Linux without installation, disk partitioning or any other complex manipulation. This CD does not install Linux on your hard disk, but it allows you to play with it at lenght before you eventually decide to proceed with a full fledged installation.    Rate this link
    • floppyfw-jt - This is a special floppyfw-jt edition of the standard floppyfw. This version uses DHCP client for eth0 and static ip address 172.16.0.254 (RFC 1918 compiliant private ip address) and netmask 255.255.255.0 for home network interface eth1.    Rate this link
    • Freesco - a free replacement for commercial routers supporting up to 3 ethernet/arcnet/token_ring/arlan network cards and up to 2 modems    Rate this link
    • Gentoo Linux - a special flavor of Linux that can be automatically optimized and customized for just about any application or need    Rate this link
    • Hard Hat Linux - commercial cross-platform embedded Linux distribution    Rate this link
    • IPCop Firewall - IPCop Linux is a complete Linux Distribution whose sole purpose is to protect the networks it is installed on.    Rate this link
    • Knoppix - bootable Linux distribution on CD, ability to create a home directory on a memory stick or similar    Rate this link
    • Linux Terminal Server Project - Linux makes a great platform for deploying diskless workstations that boot from a network server. The LTSP is all about running thin client computers in a GNU/Linux environment    Rate this link
    • Local Area Security Linux - a small 'live CD' distribution based on Knoppix that aims at being less than 185MB so it will fit on a MiniCD, ?t contains about 100 security (forensics, penetration testing, firewall, intrusion detection, etc.) tools including    Rate this link
    • RedHat Linux - most popular commercial Linux distribution    Rate this link
    • SmoothWall GPL - SmoothWall GPL is an Internet Firewall Operating System, which allows you to use (or reclaim) a server, workstation or redundant PC into a fully-functional firewall to protect your network.    Rate this link
    • Novell SUSE Linux - commercial Linux distribution    Rate this link
    • ThinLinux - ThinLinux is a minimal Linux packaging paradigm expressed as a basic kit. The kit contains a minimal system, just enough to get it to boot.    Rate this link
    • Yellow Dog Linux - Linux for the PowerPC.    Rate this link
    • Yoper    Rate this link
    • Fedora - The Fedora Project is a Red-Hat-sponsored and community-supported open source project. The goal of The Fedora Project is to work with the Linux community to build a complete, general purpose operating system exclusively from free software. Development will be done in a public forum. The project will produce time-based releases of Fedora Core about 2-3 times a year.    Rate this link
    • The Fedora Legacy Project - The Fedora Legacy Project is a community-supported open source project. It is not a supported project of Red Hat, Inc. although Red Hat, Inc. does provide some support services for it. The goal of The Fedora Legacy Project is to work with the Linux community to provide security and critical bug fix errata packages for select End of Life Red Hat Linux and Fedora Core distributions. This will allow for a longer effective life for those releases.    Rate this link
    • Thinstation - Thinstation is a thin client Linux distribution that makes a PC a full-featured thin client supporting all major connectivity protocols: Citrix ICA, MS Windows terminal services (RDP), Tarantella, X, telnet, tn5250 and SSH. Thinstation can be booted from network (e.g. diskless) using Etherboot/PXE or from a local floppy/CD/HD/flash-disk. The thin client configuration can be centralized to simplify management. Thinstation supports client-side storage (floppy/HD/CD/USB) and printers (LPT/USB). Mozilla Firefox and lighter browsers are supported as client-side browsers.    Rate this link
    • Ubuntu Linux - Ubuntu is a complete desktop Linux operating system, freely available with both community and professional support. Ubuntu is a Debian-based distro.    Rate this link

    Hardware for use with Linux

    • Linux PCMCIA HOWTO - This document describes how to install and use PCMCIA Card Services for Linux, and answers some frequently asked questions.    Rate this link
    • Linux PCMCIA Information Page - Card Services for Linux is a complete PCMCIA support package. It includes a set of loadable kernel modules that implement a version of the PCMCIA 2.1 Card Services applications program interface, a set of client drivers for specific cards, and a card manager daemon that can respond to card insertion and removal events, loading and unloading drivers on demand. It supports ``hot swapping'' of PCMCIA cards, so cards can be inserted and ejected at any time. The current package supports many ethernet cards, modems and serial cards, several SCSI adapters, most ATA/IDE devices, and some SRAM and FLASH memory cards. All the common PCMCIA controllers are supported, so it should run on just about all Linux-capable laptops.    Rate this link
    • MobiliX - Mobile Computers and UniX - Site dedicated to Mobile Unix systems. It leads you to a lot of useful hands-on information about installing and running Linux and BSD on laptops, PDAs and other mobile computer devices.    Rate this link
    • Mouse Support in XFree86 - This document describes mouse support in XFree86 4.2.0. Mouse configuration has often been mysterious task for novice users. However, once you learn several basics, it is straightforward to write the mouse "InputDevice" section in the XF86Config file by hand.    Rate this link
    • Red Hat Linux Hardware Compatibility List    Rate this link

    Tutorials

      Editors

      Vi is a text editor based on the standard Unix editor called Ex. It is available on all Unix systems and versions exist for some non-Unix systems.The vi editor is a screen-based editor used by many Unix users. It is used very much for system administration because it can be though as a built-in "standard" editor. The vi editor is a common editor for unix systems in that it makes use of a regular keyboard with an escape key. Vi works on all unix computers.Emacs is one of the most popular and powerful text editors used on Linux (and Unix). It is second in popularity only to vi. It is known for it huge feature set, ability to be easily customized, and lack of bugs.GNU Emacs is a free, portable, extensible text editor that runs on many machines under many different operating systems.That it is extensible means that you can not only customize all aspects of its usage (from key bindings through fonts, colors, windows, mousage and menus), but you can program Emacs to do entirely new things that its designers never thought of. Emacs is particularly good for programmers. If you use a common programming language, Emacs probably provides a mode that makes it especially easy to edit code in that language, providing context sensitive indentation and layout. It also probably allows you to compile your programs inside Emacs, with links from error messages to source code; debug your programs inside Emacs, with links to the source; interact directly with the language interpretor (where appropriate); manage change logs; jump directly to a location in the source by symbol (function or variable name); and interact with your revision control system.Emacs also provides mail readers, news readers, World Wide Web, gopher, and FTP clients, spell checking, and a Rogerian therapist, all of which are also useful for programming. Beginners can consider Emacs to be a very difficult program to use, but when you learn the basics of it, you will learn it's benefits and it will not be that difficult.

      sed

      "sed" stands for Stream EDitor. Sed is a non-interactive editor, which means that it is a special editing tool designed for non-interactive file editing.Instead of the user altering a file interactively by moving thecursor on the screen (like with normal editors like Emacs), the user sends ascript of editing instructions to sed, plus the name of the file toedit (or the text to be edited may come as output from a pipe). Sed reads its input from stdin (Unix shorthand for "standardinput," i.e., the console) or from files (or both), and sends theresults to stdout ("standard output," normally the console orscreen). Most people use sed first for its substitution features.Sed is often used as a find-and-replace tool.

    Crash recovery

    Crash Recovery for Linux sounds a bit superfluous. Linux is regarded as one of todays most stable Operating Systems. In the case of some hardware failure like a broken disk it can however be handy.

    • Crash Recovery Kit for Linux - Crash Recovery Kit for Linux is a Red Hat-based floppy and CD-ROM based distribution that allows a user to recover after a hardware failure, hardware discovery, testing, and backup. This CRK package can recover a trashed LILO boot record, backup data over the network in the form of tar.gz tarballs, test hardware, recover a misconfigured or hacked Linux system and make a tape backup of a disk which can't be booted anymore. The CRK is based on RedHat Linux.    Rate this link
    • LILO, Linux Crash Rescue HOW-TO - You cannot avoid accidents and if it happens to linux systems then it may damage the master boot record (MBR) or LILO (Linux boot Loader). There may be cases where linux will not boot due to hard disk failures. The LILO may also fail if you accidentally re-partition the hard disk or you install another additional operating system like Windows 98/NT on the linux computer. This document gives you some ideas, tips and quick guide to recover fast without wading through hundreds of pages of documentation on LILO or Linux.    Rate this link

    Linux Multimedia

      Graphics

      • DirectFB - DirectFB is a thin library that provides hardware graphics acceleration, input device handling and abstraction, integrated windowing system with support for translucent windows and multiple display layers on top of the Linux Framebuffer Device. It is a complete hardware abstraction layer with software fallbacks for every graphics operation that is not supported by the underlying hardware. DirectFB adds graphical power to embedded systems.    Rate this link
      • Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL) - Simple DirectMedia Layer is a cross-platform multimedia library designed to provide fast access to the graphics framebuffer and audio device. SDL provides low-level access to a system's video framebuffer, sound output, and input devices including keyboard, mouse, and joystick. SDL is used by MPEG playback software, emulators, and many popular games. Simple DirectMedia Layer supports Linux, Win32, BeOS, MacOS, Solaris, IRIX, and FreeBSD. SDL is written in C, but works with C++ natively, and has bindings to several other languages, including Ada, Eiffel, ML, Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby.    Rate this link

      Video

      • Freevo - Freevo is an open-source home theatre PC platform based on Linux and a number of open-source audio/video tools. MPlayer and/or Xine can be used to play audio and video files in most popular formats. Freevo can be used both for a standalone PVR computer with a TV+remote, as well as on a regular desktop computer using the monitor and keyboard. Freevo is easy to download and install for new users. Most hardware is supported (graphic boards, sound cards and video capture devices). The Freevo core is under heavy development. It is mostly written in the Python programming language which is very well suited for high-level control applications like Freevo.    Rate this link
      • Varsha - Varsha is a GUI based DVD authoring tool for Linux. You can make DVDs from your mpeg files as well as digital still pictures (Slideshow DVD). You can even combine slideshows with regular video and make them accessible through menus. Using Varsha, you can also create simple menus on plain background as well as moving video background. Varsha is written in Java. It uses already available command line programs such as dvdauthor, dvd+rw-tools, mkisofs to do various things in background.    Rate this link
      • GStreamer - GStreamer is a library that allows the construction of graphs of media-handling components, ranging from simple Ogg/Vorbis playback to complex audio (mixing) and video (non-linear editing) processing. Applications can take advantage of advances in codec and filter technology transparently. Developers can add new codecs and filters by writing a simple plugin with a clean, generic interface. GStreamer is released under the LGPL.    Rate this link
      • Build your own PVR - This is a community driven discussion for building your own PVR (think Tivo without a recurring subscription)    Rate this link
      • VLC media player - VLC (initially VideoLAN Client) is a highly portable multimedia player for various audio and video formats (MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, mp3, ogg, ...) as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols. It can also be used as a server to stream in unicast or multicast in IPv4 or IPv6 on a high-bandwidth network.    Rate this link
      • ZoneMinder.com - ZoneMinder.com is the home of ZoneMinder the top Linux based video camera security solution. ZoneMinder is intended for use in single or multi-camera video security applications, including theft prevention and child or family member or home monitoring and other care scenarios. It supports capture, analysis, recording, and monitoring of video data coming from one or more video or network cameras attached to a Linux system. It is suitable for both do-it-yourself and professional installations.    Rate this link
      • BTTV: A Linux driver for Bt848/849/878/879 based frame grabbers    Rate this link
      • JPEG to MPEG conversion howto    Rate this link
      • MJPEG HOWTO - An introduction to the MJPEG-tools - MJPEG capture/editting/replay and MPEG encoding toolset description    Rate this link
      • MJPEG Tools - The mjpeg programs are a set of tools that can do recording of videos and playback, simple cut-and-paste editing and the MPEG compression of audio and video under Linux.    Rate this link
      • MJPEG/Linux Tools - Mjpeg tools is a suite of programs which support video capture, editting, playback, and compression to MPEG of MJPEG video. Edit, play and compression software is hardware independent. Capture supports MJPEG hardware (Buz, Miro DC10+ etc).    Rate this link
      • MythTV - MythTV is a homebrew PVR project. It's been under heavy development for two years, and is now quite useable and featureful.    Rate this link
      • Linux DV - Kino is a non-linear DV editor for GNU/Linux. It features excellent integration with IEEE-1394 for capture, VTR control, and recording back to the camera. It captures video to disk in RawDV and AVI format, in both type-1 DV and type-2 DV (separate audio stream) encodings.    Rate this link

      TV and Linux

      • Linux TV - a platform for the development of open source software for digital television (DVB, DTV) receivers, Linux DVD players and tools to stream audio and video to the net    Rate this link
      • Tuner Cards - Learning By Looking - Hopefully, this article will help people who'd like to consider writing device drivers for tuner cards, and others who're generally interested in how TV Tuner cards work.    Rate this link
      • Using Your Brooktree Chipset TV Card in Linux - The Brooktree chipsets TV cards (BT848 and BT787) are fully supported under Linux using the bttv drivers. Many popular TV cards are supported under bttv including: Lifeview Flyvideo cards, Hauppauge cards, Micro Cards and any other Brooktree based cards. In this article we'll take a look at what it takes to turn your Linux box into a fully functional television.    Rate this link

    Embedded Linux

    Linux is fast proving to be a popular operating system for embedded network devices. It's advantages are royalty free licensing, reliable IP stack and TCP/IP Applications, source code for the OS Kernel is open and the source code for the toolchains is open.Linux supports a large range of peripherals, file systems and communication protocols, so it can be customized to many uses quite easily.There is one key difference between Linux on normal workstation environment and many embedded applications which you should keep on mind.On normal Linux system your proprietary code can be a separate executable file, which allows you to keep your proprietary code to yourself, but have to disclose any modifications to the kernel or library, because they are within the same binary object with the GPL code. In embedded, you typically link eveerything into a single binary image, oneneeds to very carefully read the license text to figure out what that really means. For example if you use LGPL code in you project you have to make it LGPL. If you just link against a library licensed under LGPL, you can be much more free what you can do.

      General

      • All about Linux-friendly Single-Board Computers - The rapidly growing and diverging single-board computer market can be hard to keep up with. Here's some history and some help.    Rate this link
      • Booting Linux from EPROM - This is a quick look at making Linux bootable from EPROM on a 486 single board computer.    Rate this link
      • BusyBox: The Swiss Army Knife of Embedded Linux - BusyBox combines tiny versions of many common UNIX utilities into a single small executable. It provides minimalist replacements for most of the utilities you usually find in fileutils, shellutils, findutils, textutils, grep, gzip, tar, etc. BusyBox provides a fairly complete POSIX environment for any small or embedded system. The utilities in BusyBox generally have fewer options than their full-featured GNU cousins; however, the options that are included provide the expected functionality and behave very much like their GNU counterparts. BusyBox has been written with size-optimization and limited resources in mind. It is also extremely modular so you can easily include or exclude commands (or features) at compile time. This makes it easy to customize your embedded systems.    Rate this link
      • BusyBox manual page    Rate this link
      • Consumer devices look to embedded Linux - Bill Weinberg and Scott Hedrick of MontaVista Software explain the development of embedded Linux and the evolution of support for new chips makes it attractive to consumer electronic designs.    Rate this link
      • Linux for PowerPC Embedded Systems HOWTO - These instructions are intended for developers who wish to build kernels and/or application on an x86 Linux platform targeted for a PPC Linux platform. Often this is desirable if one has a faster x86 host system or the target environment is not practical to host a development environment.    Rate this link
      • DIAPM RTAI - Realtime Application Interface - This is the homepage of RTAI - the Realtime Linux Application Interface for Linux - which lets you write applications with strict timing constraints for your favourite operating system. Like Linux itself this software is a community efford.    Rate this link
      • Embedding Linux in a DiskOnChip - Learn how to build a custom Linux image and install it on the DiskOnChip module without violating the GPL. This article guides you through the process of building a custom Linux image and installing it on the DiskOnChip in such a way that you will not violate the GPL. The image will be bootable and you will be able to distribute the hardware without any sort of spinning media; hard drive, floppy drive or CD-ROM.    Rate this link
      • Embedded Linux Is Starting To Make Sense    Rate this link
      • LinuxAnt - embedded Linux links, distributions, books, tools and HOWTO    Rate this link
      • Linux as an Embedded Operating System - Article from Embedded Systems magazine - Does Linux have potential as an embedded operating system? Should vendors of high-end commercial RTOSs quake in their Bruno Maglis? This article assesses Linux's features, robustness, limitations, and most importantly, its real-time facilities.    Rate this link
      • Linux Automation - information pool for engineers who want to have an overview about which electronic components, development ressources, software tools, solution providers, distributors etc. are available on the market if they want to use Linux as their tool to solve real live industrial problems    Rate this link
      • LinuxDevices.com - information regarding the use of Linux in embedded applications    Rate this link
      • Linux for PowerPC Embedded Systems HOWTO - This document is an attempt to tell you what you need to know to use Linux on an embedded PowerPC-based system, and is a distillation of the collective wisdom from the linuxppc-embedded mailing list. This document is laid out roughly in the order of the steps necessary to implement a complete system, which is similar to boot order starting at the lowest level and working upwards.    Rate this link
      • LinuxPPC - about the PowerPC port of Linux, what hardware is supported, what software is included, and what other software is available    Rate this link
      • Linux on an iPAQ - Using a Compaq 3650 iPAQ can at first be a bit of a mind-blowing experience. You're holding in your hand a 206-MHz StrongArm processor, 32 megabytes of RAM, and a 240-by-320 pixel color LCD screen. Other than the display, this is better than what we had on our desks only a few short years ago!    Rate this link
      • Linux strafes the embedded landscape - Linux is open-source, royalty-free operating system which is suitable for embedded-system market    Rate this link
      • miniHOWTO Embedded Linux 1.1a: One approach to an embedded Linux    Rate this link
      • Pick and place: Linux grabs the embedded market - Built with contributions from hundreds of software experts, the Linux operating system has captured the attention of embedded-system developers worldwide. Linux is no longer just the open-source operating system that you must download, modify, troubleshoot, and maintain yourself for your embedded application. In fact, commercial Linux support is appearing throughout the embedded industry. Vendors of bus modules and single-board computers now offer Linux preconfigured with their products. Silicon vendors are releasing new microprocessors with Linux configurations available. And software vendors maintain and support more than a dozen off-the-shelf Linux distributions as commercial products for embedded applications.    Rate this link
      • The Case for Embedded Linux - Just as it did in the server world before, the Linux craze is starting to sweep through the communication sector. All around the industry, tiny Linux penguins are popping up. And with them, designers are beginning to find a home for Linux in their designs. The question must be raised: Can an embedded Linux RTOS truly enable differentiation in a system design?    Rate this link
      • The Embedded Linux "Cool Devices" Quick Reference Guide - All this stuff about Embedded Linux 'taking off like a rocket' sounds great, but are any companies really shipping Embedded Linux in real products? . . . and, if so, when are some of these Embedded Linux based products going to start hitting the market?" The answer is "You bet, they're designing Embedded Linux into real products -- and lots of 'em!" As for when these products will start shipping to customers. Here, then, is a summary of some of the Embedded Linux based devices that have been disclosed publicly.    Rate this link
      • The Embedded Linux Distributions Quick Reference Guide    Rate this link
      • The Linux-friendly Embedded SBCs Quick Reference Guide    Rate this link
      • The Real-time Linux Software Quick Reference Guide    Rate this link
      • uClibc - a C library for embedded systems - uClibc is a C library for embedded Linux systems. . It is much smaller then the GNU C Library, but nearly all applications supported by glibc also work perfectly with uClibc. Porting applications from glibc to uClibc typically involves just recompiling the source code.    Rate this link
      • Embedded Linux nears real time - With new kernel updates and multiple latency-reduction options, Linux has become a viable alternative for many real-time-embedded-system designs    Rate this link

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