Behind The Coolest Gadgets - Linux or Windows?

An anonymous reader submits "Sister sites LinuxDevices and WindowsForDevices have kicked off what they're calling the Great Embedded Device Smack-Down, to see whether Linux or Windows Embedded powers the best and coolest devices. The Smackdown highlights more than 350 gadgets in nine categories, along with some entertaining "pre-game commentary" featuring the latest market share figures for the two OSes and a whacky clipart image of Stone Cold Bill Gates taking on The Tux."

Mars Rovers

[kippy]

Linux [linuxinsider.com]

iPod?

[mblase]

The iPod's OS isn't MacOS. It isn't even made by Apple. They bought the OS and most of the hardware spec from PortalPlayer [portalplayer.com] and then customized it to their liking.

Linux or Windows on the best devices?

[airjrdn]

Tivo runs Linux....nuff said.

Re:Neither?

[koi88]

Not mac os, not linux, not windows.
Apple bought the iPod's operating system from Pixo, a small company, that meanwhile has been acquired by Sun (try www.pixo.com [pixo.com]).
It seems to be a proprietary OS.
Some information: http://www.fact-index.com/p/pi/pixo.html [fact-index.com]

One of the coolest gadgets: Tomtom GO

[MrBoombasticfantasti]

I recently got a Tomtom GO [tomtom.nl] navigation system and it is absolutely awesome. Link may be a bit flash heavy.

It runs Linux and it's miles better (pun intended) than the Windows CE counterpart Tomtom Navigator 3 [tomtom.nl] which has occasional glitches.

If only it could run *BSD... ;-)

interface is easy to customize

[Anonymous Coward]

The portablility of X and access to many widget sets should make linux a breeze to port to any display. Linux and Unix can handle complex user interaction pretty well. The problem would be with dealing with proprietary formats. Even the the Open source community seems to have a good grasp of whatever obfuscation Microsoft or Apple throws out to confuse and capture the consumer (e.g. Samba, Open Office, Gnumeric).

Re:Mars Rovers

[bsd4me]

IIRC, Wind River [windriver.com] had a picture on their homepage of one of the previous Mars projects with a blurb saying that it ran VxWorks [windriver.com]

Re:A couple of things

[dmullenaux]

windows will never have drivers for apple mice/keyboards

Have you tried it? I have for months now been using a USB mac keyboard and mouse in our office server room. Windows 2000 works with it as well as windows 2003. Haven't tried it on NT 4 though.

Nope.

[Blob Pet]

It lists the iPaq under Linux devices.

Re:Linux had an advantage...

[Osty]

After all, linux don't have price by quantity (i.e. for devices where price matters is a big advantage), could be use with no x86 processors, could be tweaked for supporting better the surrounding hardware and could require a lot less hardware/memory/etc.

While I can't get to the product listings on the site at the moment, I assume that they're talking about "Windows Embedded" as the latest version of Windows CE, and not Windows XP Embedded. In that context, not all of your arguments stand up. For example, Microsoft's licensing on CE has been very relaxed. Yes, there's still a licensing fee, but it's not all that expensive anymore.

Also, CE supports several CPUs. The most popular currently seems to be ARM chips, but it also works on x86, MIPS, SH3/4, and I believe even PowerPCs. So, while you could choose to use a x86 processor, you certainly don't have to.

Finally, the code to CE has been opened up, and while I don't know the exact restrictions on redistributing binaries containing code changes to the core system, I do know that in most cases you don't need to do that at all. Windows CE (and XP Embedded) was designed in a very modular way, and you only need to include the pieces that your application needs. For example, if you want a headless, inputless embedded controller that does all I/O via network, you would include the core kernel and the networking stack, but not the input or output modules. I'm sure you can do the same thing with Linux, but since Linux wasn't designed from the ground up for embedded applications (Windows CE was), the solutions may be more "hacky".

On a side note, don't confuse Windows CE with Windows NT. The only similarities between the two are the name "Windows" and support for some subset of Win32 (which CE initially wasn't going to support at all, until the designers got smart and realized that there was no reason they couldn't support a small subset of Win32 and allow skills from the large pool of Win32 developers to carry over to the embedded space). The Windows CE kernel was designed independently of NT, and was intended to enforce real-time constraints from the very start. The OS itself really is quite elegant, and even was back in its early life, though the applications (clamshell and pocket PCs) were poor in comparison to competitors (Palm) at the time.

Re:Nope.

[JabberWokky]

Considering Compaq does support iPaqs with Linux (send a borked install to their Research Lab, and it comes back with Linux), I'd say that it's at least semi-official that Linux runs on iPaqs even if it's not a shipping option. Compaq even hosts handhelds.org and has paid engineers to work on the distros for the iPaq.

Iffy, sure, but not unreasonable to include iPaqs under both categories as a 'Windows' and 'Linux' device.

--
Evan