I’m currently attending OSCON, and with BUG being on the front page of Linux Journal this seems like the perfect time to announce that the next release of the BUG software will be based on Poky Linux!  This means almost every aspect of the software will change for the better, but the most apparent change is a fresh new interface*.  Other changes are important for developers and others that want deep control over the software running on their BUG.

Years ago when we started this crazy mess, we looked at several different build systems for which all our application and operating code would be defined and generated. We decided at the time to go with LTIB, a build tool maintained by Freescale and the system that ships with the initial hardware we used to develop the BUG. LTIB is a great tool for generating Linux-based kernels and root-filesystems for applications, and is actively supported and maintained by Freescale.  However BUG, as a platform, has outgrown the scope of what LTIB is designed to provide. We recognized a need for a general purpose Linux operating system with a great community and plenty of software.

After looking at several projects and distributions, we ended up choosing Poky, a subset of Open Embedded.  Open Embedded is a true community-based project for building and running Linux on small computers. Essentially Poky provides a set of scripts used to handle cross compiling and a set of package metadata that allows anyone to add and configure software for a machine. Because Poky is based on Open Embedded, users are able to take advantage of its huge package library. Poky is produced by Opened Hand, a great set of folks of which I had the opportunity to meet at GUADEC 2008.

If you’d like to see more, we have a getting started guide on our wiki for building Poky Linux for BUG.  Note that this is still preliminary so if you run into problems please let us know!

*: For those that were happy with xeyes as the primary BUG application, don’t worry, we have ported it to Poky.