Re: [ts-7000] Re: About to give up

[Gary Wicker <>]

We've had good luck with the Technologic boards (TS-7250s) and I feel that their software provides a good start for product development.  The hardware is reliable and we have been able to backport needed changes into their kernel and RedBoot source without too many issues.  That said, we are very conservative and typically avoid bleeding edge and latest-and-greatest software.  Having delivered a number of commercial products running on embedded linux, I know that people are amazed when I tell them what ancient version of the kernel some of these things are shipping with.  It is hard to stay up-to-date when there are features to implement and test and milestones to meet.

My view is that Technologic is a good hardware company that provides some starter software that demonstrates the capabilities of their boards.  Software takes a lot of resources and is very time-consuming and expensive.  General-purpose computers like the TS series are used in so many different sorts of applications, it would be practically impossible for a small company like Technologic to keep up-to-date on every software package.  If you are doing product development and you need every software version to be current and tested and compatible with one another, there are companies that can help.  But of course those services are not available for the price of a $200 board.

Just my $0.02.  Good luck everyone.

Gary Wicker
qhorus.com

On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 2:04 PM, Seth LaForge <m("humcycles.com","seth");">> wrote:

On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 1:15 PM, janne.kario <> wrote:

I'm a hobbyist so I'm using the board for non-commercial stuff. I didn't even try to use the default busybox or ts kernel. For me the shortest path to success was to get recent kernel and recent version of debian / openembedded running on the board and from there on rely on the broad userbase and available documentation of those communities.

How easy was it to get a recent kernel going?  On a TS-7800, I diffed that TS kernel with the stock kernel, immediately paled at the vast difference between the two, and decided that they have a giant pile of undocumented patches to make it work and I didn't have time to track them all down.
 

This option gives me the most options, support and continuity. I do think that could also apply on the commercial side. However, I don't know the client profile TS has. Which percentage the clients are content with the default stuff and which percentage use the board to break the boundaries using the latest stuff available. Might be that the majority of their customers are content with the default busybox for example and use it for simple C programs / shell scripts which read serial port etc.

Well, I can tell you that this particular customer is pretty unsatisfied with the TS software situation.  The stock install is a very old version of Debian set up poorly, the kernel is ancient, their web/ftp server is so slow that it takes a good portion of a day to download anything significant from their site, and the documentation is poor.  It's very frustrating and has wasted a lot of my time.
 

From my standpoint (as a hobbyist) TS is doing the wrong thing (maintaining their own kernel fork / busybox rootfs / debian rootfs). They could concentrate all that effort into getting TS peripheral stuff driver support into mainline and just riding the wave from there on. Rootfs is not a problem. Anyone should be fairly easily able to come up with a rootfs which suits their specific needs. I do think that the same applies also on the commercial side.

Seconded!

Seth LaForge
Mission Motors
www.ridemission.com

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