Subject: Re: Good embedded board to start with

From: Dan Malek <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 08 Dec 1999 16:44:43 -0500

Mika Kuoppala wrote:

> This is just an evaluation project and we are going
> to buy one board only at start.

People willing to sell you just a single board without
any potential future sales don't usually provide the
best experience.  People that sell production quality
boards to companies that value their development time,
want to minimize risk, and want to minimize time to
market are investing to provide the tools that allow
you to start application development within minutes of
receiving the boards.

> .... Main purpose is just to
> get into embedded-ppc world and get it up and running, and
> doing so gain self-confidence that ppc might be an alternative
> to x86 in embedded things.

Because of the volume of PPC to x86 in the market today,
many companies have proven PPC is the preferred embedded
processor.  I have personally assisted several companies
switch from x86 to PPC, so they may realize lower cost, lower
power, smaller form factor and expand their product features.
All of them used a Linux/PPC kernel that you can download
from the servers, with custom applications to suit their
requirements.

> ......I know linux rather well on x86
> side but in ppc world only thing i have currently is motivation.

Linux is Linux.  It looks the same.  On the PPC the bytes are
in their proper world order.....As are the bits, but I won't
discuss that now :-).

> Am i totally in too deep waters with this ?

I have heard of people drowning in a cup of water, but I
doubt there is anything you are doing that hasn't been
proven to work before.

It seems to me you are just going to waste time proving to
yourself that what others have done actually works.  There is
no reason to wonder any longer.  If you want to develop
products using PPC and Linux, just decide to do that and
leverage the work of others.

People trying to develop custom hardware and port all of the
software from scratch are going to be left in the dust by
companies rapidly creating new products on available production
quality hardware and software.

	-- Dan

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