MontaVista

MontaVista Software develops systems software, development tools and Embedded Linux-based software targeting embedded systems such as automotive electronics, communications equipment, and television set-top boxes and other connected devices and infrastructure. It is based in Santa Clara, California and was founded in 1999 by James "Jim" Ready (previously at Mentor Graphics and creator of VRTX) and others.

Products

MontaVista's more famous products include:

MontaVista Linux

This is a version of Linux that has been enhanced to become a full fledged real-time operating system. The core changes done by MontaVista were made by Robert Love and submitted back to the Linux kernel. Ultimately some of these changes have served as a motivating factor in the development of newer features in the mainstream Linux 2.6 stable series.

The work on real-time performance has since continued to a point where MontaVista claims to support hard real-time tasks on Embedded Linux as of MontaVista Linux 4.0.

The Linux distribution is available in three editions: Professional Edition, Carrier Grade Edition and Consumer Electronics Edition. The MontaVista Linux toolkit includes specific code libraries to easily migrate from old designs using the Wind River Systems' VxWorks and the pSOS operating systems.

Montavista has historically had strong connections with PowerPC Linux development, and hosts a development Linux kernel source tree on source.mvista.com.

MontaVista Graphics

This is a graphic toolkit based on the smallX (previously tinyX) implementation of the X Window System, GTK+ (including Pango and Accessibility Toolkit), FreeType, and IceWM. Starting with the 4.0 editions, MontaVista Graphics has been folded into the regular distributions and is no longer available as a separate product.

MontaVista DevRocket

This is an integrated development environment based on Eclipse. DevRocket runs on Linux, Solaris and Windows. It utilizes the Eclipse C Development Toolkit (CDT). Starting with DevRocket 5.0, one can choose between a standalone version or just add the MontaVista-specific plugins to an existing Eclipse setup.

Distribution

The MontaVista Linux distribution is a very popular Linux distribution in consumer electronics, especially in Japan and EMEA. MontaVista Linux powers a large number of Linux based Smartphones and other consumer electronics, as well as larger embedded devices.

Mobile phones

MontaVista Linux was used in the Motorola A760 and Motorola A768i phones by Motorola. This was despite the fact that Motorola was a founding member of a competing OS, the Symbian OS. The A760 was released in February 16, 2003 to the China market. This was also the first time Linux was used on a mobile phone. Since then, Motorola has increased focus on its Linux platform and publicly stated that Linux and Java will be their future platform.

Mobile phones using MontaVista Linux

Motorola A760
Motorola A768
Motorola A768i
Motorola A780
Motorola A910
Motorola E680
Motorola E680i
Motorola MING
Motorola RAZR2
Motorola ROKR E2
Motorola ROKR E6
Motorola RIZR Z6
NEC N900iL
NEC N901iC
Panasonic P901i

Lottery terminals

The terminals used for the National Lottery and Euromillions games in the Republic of Ireland are based on MontaVista Linux and use a Java client, as do most other newer GTech Altura terminals. These designs were previously based on VxWorks.

Texas Instruments

Texas Instruments have announced that they will be using MontaVista Linux Professional Edition as the supported operating system for their new System-on-Chip platform DaVinci.

Musical instruments

Yamaha MOTIF XS music production synthesiser [1]

External links