Local company Keystone Electronic Solutions has launched Guinnux, a Linux-based operating system distribution developed in-house by a team of electronic engineers.
The launch took place at National Electronics Week 2012 where Guinnux was demonstrated in a live environment using the Guinnux Starter Kit, which is now also available for evaluation from Keystone.
John Eigelaar, Keystone director, explains: “The main design goal of Guinnux was to create a compact yet expandable system, without reducing application portability. It consists of the Guinnux kernel, root file system images, an application repository of pre-packaged binary applications and utilities, as well as the associated development tools and libraries to enable the development and porting of applications to the Guinnux environment. Guinnux is available free of charge from our community web site www.guinnux.org.”
Eigelaar explains that there are three parts to Guinnux. The first part includes the KSES SAM9 architecture BSPs (board support packages), kernel binary and default root file system image. The second part is the Guinnux packaged application repository, and the third part is the Guinnux development environment which includes GNU toolchain binaries, kernel patches and development files for application libraries.
All binaries have been built with the ARM-EABI toolchain in order to make all packages and applications binary-compatible with all ARM-EABI architectures.
The Guinnux Starter Kit was created to serve as an easy entry point for the evaluation of the Guinnux runtime and development environment. The kit consists of an ARM9-based development board with a 5 V/220 V a.c. external power supply and MicroSD card for use with the development board.
The Guinnux development board has several I/O interfaces such as two x RS232 serial interfaces, USB 1.1 Host and Device ports, 10/100 Mbps LAN interface and an I/O expansion connector to provide access to all unused I/O / peripheral functionality on the board.
The development board is shipped with the latest Guinnux Linux kernel pre-programmed onto the board and the default Guinnux ext4 root file system loaded onto the accompanying microSD card. The Guinnux kernel binary and root file system images are available for download from www.guinnux.org and the development board can be upgraded or reprogrammed through the onboard Redboot boot loader.
The default root file system contains all the utilities required to remotely access and customise the Guinnux development board. The openSSH server and the OPKG package manager are included, amongst others. The OPKG package manager is configured to make use of the Guinnux package repository at www.guinnux.org.
According to Eigelaar, the repository contains a rich set of pre-packaged open source applications and binaries which can be installed onto the Guinnux development board by making use of the OPKG command utility. The Guinnux OPKG package repository is actively maintained and packages can be upgraded on the Guinnux board by making use of the OPKG upgrade interface.
Eigelaar concludes: “We are encouraging developers to try out the Guinnux embedded Linux distribution, and to contribute to the Guinnux community by submitting ported applications and development packages for inclusion into the repository, providing BSP binaries for your own Guinnux compatible hardware for inclusion into the BSP part of Guinnux, and by providing feedback as to required package ports.”
For more information contact Ivan Popov, Keystone Electronic Solutions, +27 (0)12 460 4135, info@kses.net, www.kses.net
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