Transmeta, the company which claims Linus Torvalds (creator of Linux) as an employee, has finally unveiled their long awaited Linux distribution -- Midori Linux. Contrary to many expectations, Midori Linux is not targeted at the notebook computer market where most of Transmeta's CPU chips appear to be finding homes -- rather, Midori seems to be destined for small devices, particularly Web pads and so-called Internet appliances.
Given the fact that Transmeta is a CPU manufacturer, why did they decide to develop their own Linux distribution for small devices, instead of partnering with one or more of the growing band of Embedded Linux distributions? After all, these companies are well positioned to provide the required technical support, services, and tools, and already support a broad spectrum of processors -- from x86 to microcontrollers.
In the hopes of gaining some insight into Transmeta's motivations and plans regarding its new Midori Linux distribution, Rick Lehrbaum spoke with the leader the Midori Project, Transmeta employee Dan Quinlan. Here's what he learned . .
RL: Why did Transmeta decide to create a new Linux distribution, when there are already so many available?
Quinlan: Although to date Crusoe sales have mostly been in the notebook computer space, Midori is not meant for notebook computers. We expect standard Linux distributions to be used in notebooks, with perhaps a few minor additions to better support Crusoe's power management features such as "LongRun". Instead, the focus of Midori is on small devices like Web pads, rather than notebook computers, where system resources such as RAM and Flash memory tend to be very limited, where you don't have hundreds of megs of RAM or disk space.
Transmeta created a Web pad reference design, based on the Crusoe processor, which serves as a development system for product designs. For example, the Gateway Connected Touch Pad is based on our Web pad reference design and many other products based on it are in various stages of development. Midori Linux is currently targeted primarily to this platform, in order to provide Transmeta's customers with a ready-to-use Linux environment. It's also meant to serve as a platform for developing new technologies to support these kinds of devices.
RL: Could I use Midori Linux on my desktop PC? Would I want to?
Quinlan: Midori is not really meant for large system with the resources of a desktop PC. We wanted a platform that would have the attributes needed by small devices. Midori is meant for "Internet Appliances," which are systems that have a display, an Internet connection, and no hard drive. In these devices, small RAM and disk footprint and low power consumption are big issues.
On the other hand, we're not targeting the PDA market with Midori Linux. We're interested in systems that run standard Linux apps, not ones that are limited to the "PIM suites" of PDAs. Basically, Midori is good for lower power and smaller memory footprint systems, but ones that have adequate resources to run standard applications. Also, Midori is well put together, very configurable using an easy-to-use browser interface, and it's based on a standard Linux kernel with just a few patches.
RL: But why did you develop your own Linux distribution for small devices, when there are already several Embedded Linux offerings on the market?
Quinlan: Actually, we originally started with Debian, and tried to go the customisation route. But we quickly realised it would require a lot of revision, so we decided instead to put together our own system, from the kernel up. Remember, this was back in late 1999, when there wasn't really much off-the-shelf Embedded Linux available.
Another incentive for us to do Midori is that it is easiest to develop new technologies on a platform that we control. Examples are cramfs (a compressed read-only file system) and ramfs (a dynamically sized ram disk), which are very useful in these kinds of small devices.
RL: Basically, what is included in Midori?
Quinlan: The base Midori system consists of . . .
- The Linux kernel (2.4.0) with some simple patches
- busybox
- most of glibc
- we include all of libc
- we don't strip functions out of the libraries
- we will leave out entire libraries (like pthreads, for example) when they are not needed
- we include all of libc
- the Midori build system
- packcramfs, a utility for managing multiple cramfs images
- XFree86 4.0
- cramfs provides 2:1 compression
