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Software MontaVista Creates New Mobile Linux OS
Michael Hoffman (Blog) - September 27, 2007 8:04 AM
Print 4 comment(s) - last by wrong.. on Sep 28 at 1:44 AM
MontaVista's latest mobile OS offers slew of new upgrades

MontaVista recently announced the release of Mobilinux 5.0, the company's mobile operating system that is used by the majority of smart phones operating the Linux operating system.  Mobilinux 5.0 was designed to help reduce build costs for cell phone manufacturers.

MontaVista Linux is already in use by at least 35 million devices, with more than 90 percent of Linux-based smartphones using Mobilinux.

The latest version of the operating system offers better security, Bluetooth and WiFi support, more power management tools, and Linux 2.6.21 kernel support.  It also ships with SELinux - security-enhanced Linux - a National Security Agency-created version of Linux.

"No other mobile operating system today gives developers so many ways to unleash their creativity to add new functions," said Jim Ready, MontaVista Software CTO and founder.  "Mobilinux 5.0 delivers new technologies invented by MontaVista for configurable dynamic power management, plus a powerful security framework that MontaVista's competitors can only dream about."

Along with the other improvements implemented in Mobilinux 5.0, the mobile phone startup time should also decrease, said MontaVista.  Mobile phones running Mobilinux should boot on average in less than five seconds.  

MontaVista expects Mobilinux 5.0 to globally launch in November.

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bad name
By Visual on 9/27/2007 10:41:11 AM , Rating: 2
man they should've named it Linux Vista or some such...
nobody would be able to sue them for using their company name in their product name, right?




RE: bad name
By Moishe on 9/27/2007 11:41:02 AM , Rating: 2
Vista isn't such a great name that everyone has to use it just because they can.

Plus, Microsoft would probably complain and it's cheaper and easier to just avoid all similarities, especially if both products are an OS.


RE: bad name
By Polynikes on 9/27/2007 12:11:14 PM , Rating: 5
Linux Vista doesn't tell you anything about the product. People would get confused and think it's the Windows Vista shell ported to Linux or something.

Mobilinux, on the other hand, perfectly describes what the OS is for.


The nature of SELinux
By wrong on 9/28/2007 1:44:35 AM , Rating: 2
SELinux is not a version of Linux. It is a Linux feature contributed by the NSA which allows a system to set policy restricting what system services can do in an attempt to mitigate a security breach.

It also causes perfectly ordinary system configurations to fail silently - and it's sufficiently hard to configure that when you (eventually) find out it's SELinux doing it, the suggested remedy from the OS vendor is always to disable SELinux rather than fix the broken SELinux policy.

An embedded system might be inflexible enough for SELinux to to work, I guess.




"Nowadays, security guys break the Mac every single day. Every single day, they come out with a total exploit, your machine can be taken over totally. I dare anybody to do that once a month on the Windows machine." -- Bill Gates









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