Buying and Reading "Building Embedded Linux Systems"

Last week I picked up Building Embedded Linux Systems from Chapters at Robson & Granville and headed to the Yaletown Starbucks to read it. It was a sunny day--a wonderful day to learn something new.

The concepts were familiar. I worked on project at my last job that used rather similar steps to bring up and develop a system, except with a different RTOS. One of the bigger differences seemed to be that Linux is more dependent on a filesystem than the RTOS's I have used thus far. And, the idea of using a netfile system is interesting.

I learned a bit about boot-loaders. I had used Lilo to dual boot my Windows 98 / Redhat box. But I wasn't aware of the features available in a full featured boot loader.

The cross compiling tool chain construction with smaller libraries was interesting. I am used to getting a tool chain, so it is interesting to think about the issues of cross compilation and generating a tool chain.

But soon my coffee was empty and I had to go home. I was engrossed in the book for the next couple of days. The concepts were geling quickly. I was getting excited about trying out some of the ideas. But all I have is a laptop...