Today Dell is launching a new technology for laptops called Latitude ON. This technology puts a small-board computer into a laptop case, sharing the keyboard and screen while it is running and the host machine’s OS is hibernating. Latitude ON has access to the laptop’s network as well as its own cellular-based network, and provides Exchange-capable email as well as web surfing with Firefox. This configuration can provide email and browsing for up to 17 hours.

A few bloggers have erroneously surmised that the OS could be SUSE Enterprise Edition, or some other off-the-shelf distro. Around here we know better—it was actually developed in-house by MontaVista. We call it Montabello. I provided a Montabello demo at the CELF Embedded Linux Conference this past spring. It was running very well on a TI Beagle Board, which gives some indication of its flexibility.

What is most innovative about Montabello is not actually the technology—after all, single-board computers have been running variants of Linux for a long time, and certainly there are other MID packages available. The exciting aspect of Montabello is the hybrid arrangement, putting two separate computers in the same case. In the course of a normal business day, I know I spend far more time on email and browsing than I do on pretty much any other task, and it is getting to be more that way as more of my activities are handled in the cloud, sometimes our private cloud here at work and sometimes out in the world. It makes no more sense to run a full laptop for that activity than it does to take a dump truck to the grocery store. Latitude ON is more like a Tesla: not a lot of hauling capacity, but it gets you where you need to go quickly and extremely efficiently. Like a cell phone it is literally always on, so boot time is immaterial.

Check out the video demonstration that puts Montabello through its paces. It’s interesting, innovative stuff, and I predict there will be many more products using this arrangement in the future.

As I discussed far too long ago in my last post, one of the two hugely magical novelties of MVL6 is a new set of tools to manage content and build it directly into images. The other magical novelty is the introduction of Market-Specific Distributions, or MSDs, which will be discussed in a future post on this blog. These tools provide very straightforward access to your MontaVista content and an even easier way to build that content.

The MontaVista Integration Platform centerpiece is BitBake, an open-source build system that makes make look absolutely steampunk by comparison. BitBake is an object-oriented, Python-based build system that uses “recipes” as instruction sets. Recipes build on each other using straightforward rules of inheritance. Frequently-used instructions can be collected in a class and called rather than replicated, making new recipes very easy to write. MVL6 comes with a set of metadata that enables developers to mix and match recipes with impunity.

MVL6 has been compared with OpenEmbedded, the open-source metadata system on which MVL6 was originally based. OpenEmbedded also enables developers to build images using BitBake recipes. However, MVL6 is as similar to OpenEmbedded as MVL5 was to RedHat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), which is to say, not even close. The actual bits that are used by BitBake in MVL6 are customized for each hardware platform that MontaVista supports, and are collected into MSDs. Each MSD represents a custom, per-board distribution, fully tested, that provides features and functionality above and beyond anything available from OpenEmbedded, served from a central Content Server that is guaranteed to contain the content described in the MSD.

This is the first in a series of posts describing how MontaVista Linux 6 can make your development cycle faster, and also how it can help keep you sane in a crazy world.

To start with, the biggest change in MVL6 is in content delivery—how we get bits to you to play with. In the past, MontaVista Linux shipped with a standardized kernel, the same for all platforms, and a Linux Support Package (LSP) which consisted of a set of supporting patches, utilities, drivers, userland bits, and development tools. The patched kernel and the rest of the LSP provided developers with a customized work environment for a particular hardware platform.

MontaVista Linux 6 improves on that by serving all those bits from a central Content Server. The tools we provide to access that content are called the Integration Platform, and they consist of a few very easy-to-use project management utilities and a very powerful open-source build tool called BitBake. BitBake is like make on steroids, and it has the ability to automatically download all of the content you need from the MontaVista Content Server. BitBake’s real strength is in the large, integrated, tested set of metadata that enables it to build an bootable image (kernel and root filesystem) with a single command. Adding new components or customizing existing ones is easy, repeatable, and well-planned.

The other major change from previous versions of MontaVista Linux is the introduction of Market-Specific Distributions (MSDs). These are functionally similar to LSPs, but instead of being a set of patches and additional bits, MSDs are complete, optimized distribution mechanisms in themselves: specific to a market rather than an individual board, feature-complete with the Linux distribution from the hardware vendor, and packed with MontaVista-supplied add-ons, quality testing, support, and build metadata.

Watch this space for more information about MVL6.