“I suspect it will come as no surprise that the second
Embedded Linux Expo & Conference (ELEC), held October 27, 2000
in Westborough, MA (near Boston), was another great success! As in
the case of last June’s ELEC, the event was well attended from both
the attendee and exhibitor perspective, and the day was permeated
by a clear sense that Embedded Linux is truly “a market on
fire.“
“This time, there was an additional day — the day prior to the
one-day Conference & Expo — devoted to an all-day
classroom-style Embedded Linux hands-on workshop. The session was
conducted by Kevin Dankwardt of K Computing, a training and
consulting firm. I had the pleasure of attending that session, and
can heartily recommend it to anyone who wants to learn more about
embedding Linux.”
“There were about 25 participants and we worked in groups of two
to a lab bench. Get this: our project for the day was, working in
teams of two, to convert the PC on each of our lab stations into a
remotely controlled “headless” (i.e. no graphics output) embedded
mp3 player. Basically, in the course of the day, we started from
Red Hat Linux 6.2 sources and built a minimized kernel (starting
from menuconfig) and filesystem, created and tested a system image,
compressed and transferred the system image to a floppy diskette,
booted from the floppy, and tested the resulting standalone mp3
player. Incidentally, we used BusyBox for embedded utilities,
syslinux to load Linux, and GoAhead as the embedded webserver.”