Learning About Enea's Real Time Linux Embedded OS (Video)

Video Learning About Enea's Real Time Linux Embedded OS (Video) 27

Posted by Roblimo on Wednesday September 10, 2014 @05:02PM from the not-quite-real-time-but-almost dept.

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Jon Aldama is the Product Marketing Manager for Enea A.B., but he prides himself on being a developer first and a marketer second -- a point he stresses early in today's video. Enea is behind Operating System Embedded, whose Wikipedia page, some say, "appears to be written like an advertisement," which an unkind person could also say about the Enea A.B. Wikipedia page. In any case, Enea works with the Linux Foundation's Yocto Project workgroup, whose main webpage says, "It's not an embedded Linux distribution – it creates a custom one for you." This is all open source, which Jon says is a big corporate principle at Enea -- and he should know, since his previous job was as an Open Source Compliance Officer and Software Analyst at Ericsson. (Alternate Video Link)

Timothy Lord: Jon, you are here at LinuxCon at Chicago. You work for Enea Software. Tell us a little bit about what Enea is doing in the world of Linux and open source.

Jon Aldama: Okay. I am a marketing director at Enea. And Enea is a Swedish company, it was founded in 1968. It does mainly operating system solutions as well as software tools. We have cloud and middle management middleware solutions as well as meta databases and professional services around Linux.

Tim: Now when you use the word ‘solutions’ a lot of people are going to complain about that word—I would—what does that mean? Put some meat on that. What does your company actually produce?

Jon: Solutions—the reason why we are here is because we have a commercial embedded Linux distribution based on the Yocto project. So that will be a solution. That will be a platform that we create and we give to our customers for them to make great products. So that’s why we use the ____ word solutions sometimes. Because the platform is just one bit—a very important bit—in order to make great products. And yeah

Tim: Where does Yocto fit in to the products that you actually provide?

Jon: Well, Yocto is a tremendously important part of anybody that’s doing embedded Linux nowadays. Yocto is—I don’t know if you have heard it but if you’ve had, you would know that Yocto is Linux Foundation World Group. The Linux community can’t take care of anything. The Linux Foundation has under it all the open source projects that take care of different things. The Yocto project takes care of embedded Linux development. What it does is to make life for beta developers very easy. And it is important to say that it is not an embedded distribution—we help you create your own. It does that by providing the build system and tools and processes and practices and everything that you might need to create your own embedded distribution. It is great to start with. It became the universal starting point for embedded Linux.

Tim: And Enea has taken that as a starting point and actually created more than one distribution at this point.

Jon: Well, yeah. We have created in essence one distribution but

Tim: You put it in an interesting way.

Jon: Yeah, it was put in an interesting way. We thought we created our commercial distribution a few years back. And then we thought that at some point that well this is Linux and people are used to just trying things. People are not used to calling a company, having to sign an NDA in order to try to the software. Even if it is at the end of the day, distributed under the GPL license, in some cases, people have to call companies and sign _____ agreements or whatever in order to just be able to look at the code. So we thought well let’s take our distribution and make it available for popular development boards, like the TI Beaglebone Black and other boards.

Tim: Can you tell me what does it run on right now?

Jon: It is an important tool. It is a very new project. And it is only working on two boards at this point. So what I was trying to say is that we have a commercial distribution, at the same time we make this open version available for anybody to try and to use. It will great for independent developers to do their own projects. At the same time, it will be great for companies maybe making prototypes and thinking if that would be a suitable distribution for an end product.

Tim: Talk about the software packages that are available. Because one thing with embedded software in general, you are often talking about the very specific target platform and sometimes software has to be recompiled. You have actually assembled all that software so that it is a simpler process. Can you talk about that?

Jon: Yeah. The idea behind it is to bring embedded or to bring desktop Linux commodities to the embedded world. I think the embedded developer is used to—you are running your Linux distribution and at some point maybe you realize that one package is not completely right, or that you are missing a package, and then it is quite common to have to download source code, build it, or cross compile it, put it all together, deploy it again on target. I mean that it is a tedious work. It takes forever. That’s not what you are doing when you are just in Ubuntu for instance, or Red Hat or whatever desktop distribution. I mean you are used to having a bunch of packages you would be using not even half of them, and when you eventually need one, you just install it. So we thought, it would be great if we could do that in the embedded world. So that’s what we’ve done in our open distribution, OpenEneaLinux it is called. So for instance, for Beaglebone Black, what we’ve done is to we have made a website that you can download everything and then it says ‘Would you like distribution?’It comes with a package manager, you just configure the package manager to point at our server, and then for the Beaglebone Black we’ve got over 20,000 packages that you can install. That makes life so much easier, and the amount of time you are saving to get the tailor distribution is tremendous.

Tim: You also cut out sort of the possibility of introducing errors if you say compiling on another machine or if you are tracking down a problem you eliminate the step, because you are providing the precompiled version.

Jon: Sorry, I didn’t get the question.

Tim: You are providing the precompiled versions so you are eliminating that kind of error.

Jon: Oh absolutely. It is an open source project so you can look at the source code. But it is a binary distribution. The idea is that you will not have to be configuring and recompiling anything yourself. So everything is provided in binary form and all the instructions to deploy it on target. So it is basically you don’t have to be a Linux developer, an experienced Linux developer. Because that is the case with many embedded developers that come from other backgrounds, from the RTOS background and the company wants to move into Linux and now they find themselves, they know a lot of the embedded world but they are not so experienced in Linux. And it is really hard to get started. So this is a great starting point I believe.

Tim: Now one of the boards that you are supporting the Beaglebone Black is popular but it is probably not quite as popular right now as the Raspberry Pi. Is the Raspberry Pi on your roadmap?

Jon: You know what? Our commercial distribution supports Raspberry Pi and we have been working with it so much. Since we have been working with it so much we thought let’s just do something else. Because most of what we do especially for this open source project is we are doing it for fun, because we like it. And we felt like let’s pick something new. Let’s refer a little bit to hardware. So that’s why we picked the Beaglebone Black.

Tim: And you are actually in a funny position, you are doing a marketingish job, you also program, rather than some people get roped into it the other way.

Jon: Yeah. That’s my background. I love I feel marketing is an interesting job and I love what I do. At the same time, it is just I have been programming almost my whole life. And I just like to get my hands dirty from time to time. So that’s part of my job that allows me to have a little bit fun around software.

Tim: The package manager that you are using now with all the available binaries, is it based on existing package managers in the world?

Jon: Absolutely. We are using Smart, so it all works with RPM packages, but we have tested others, but right now I’d rather encourage people to use Smart because that’s what we test and that’s what we know works well. And also that’s the one that the Yocto project encourages people to use as well.

Tim: You’ve brought your laptop here.

Jon: Yeah.

Tim: You want to show a few things on there.

Jon: Absolutely. So here we have the home page of OpenEneaLinux. And so you can see, there are three things you can do here: You can go to Discover, Deploy and Develop. Discover will tell you a little bit about what OpenEneaLinux is and what we are trying to achieve. Deploy will take you to the boards that will support and instructions to download and deploy on target, and configure, and configure the package manager. And Develop is a very interesting part—I forgot to mention. Develop is we have put together a bunch of open source tools that we think is a great combination of tools to do a lot of things. And they are exclusively open source—that’s very important. We have put that together with video tutorials, and instructions on how to use them, configure them, and everything. So it is not just a distribution but a lot of tools for you to develop your application or your project—whatever you are doing with it. So it is a complete package. And that is why we say that’s all you need for embedded development. Because it really is. And that’s we are trying to make it.

Tim: And if someone has a Beaglebone Black right now, they’ve ordered, it is only about hundred bucks, I think $29 or something,

Jon: $45.

Tim: $45 now. Wow. If they want to get started with this, what should they do?

Jon: Just go to OpenEneaLinux.org and just browse through these sections and just follow it. You will go to the Deploy section and then you can oops! I didn’t connect it

Tim: We’ll blame the conference network here.

Jon: It is. It is. Yeah, I think it is the one over here. And then you would be selecting one of the boards that would support, and if you take for instance the Beaglebone Black, you will end up in this space. It will explain a little bit what you are about to do and it will take you through all the instructions that you need to do in order to get the ______SD card and configure the board with phone SD Card and configure the package manager and try to download package and customize the distribution.

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