LinuxDevices.com: A developer’s review of Red Hat’s Embedded Linux Developer Suite

“As the best-known Linux company and, following its
purchase of Cygnus, a long history of producing and using GNU tools
in embedded applications, it is reasonable to expect Red Hat to
provide an Embedded Linux toolkit befitting its industry
leadership.

Like most other Embedded Linux toolkits, ELDS provides support
for the x86, ARM/StrongARM/XScale, MIPS, PowerPC, and SuperH
architectures. It requires 1.2 GB of hard disk space on the
development host, installing itself at /opt/redhat — giving you no
opportunity to install elsewhere. It is very specific in its host
distribution requirements; you must use Red Hat Linux, either 7.1
or 7.2, running only under x86. ELDS also requires specific
versions of Perl and Python, installing them for you if needed.

The primary market for an Embedded Linux toolkit is new users,
since more experienced users can assemble and use the freely
available tools without commercial help. So it is especially
important that the documentation for such a toolkit be of the
highest quality. But the documentation for ELDS is curiously rough,
in contrast to Red Hat’s usual high quality. I found it to be
poorly organized, wordy, repetitive, and clumsily phrased. It is
also sometimes unintentionally amusing, as when the author tells
us, “The software provides . . . many unsupported tools”, adding
parenthetically, “(even though these tools may successfully work)”;
as if Red Hat would include tools without some evidence they do
something useful. The documentation is full of such poorly worded
and often unnecessary statements, producing an overall distracting
effect. After a few pages of this one wants to just fire up the
software even without first having an adequate understanding of how
it works.”

Complete
Story