Happy 2006 with a penguin!

Penguin New Year wishes and good reasons for using Free Software in 2006

Bootlin wishes a Happy New Year to embedded system developers and to all members of the Free Software and Open Source community.

Unlike other birds…
Penguins never freeze!
While most others stay locked in a cozy shelter…

In 2006,
with a penguin,
you can reach out,
withstand extreme conditions,
and pioneer an exciting world of opportunities!
Happy New Year!


2006 wish card, front

  • License: right to copy and modify if the copyright notice is kept. Graphic elements (trees, cottage…) can be copied and modified with no restriction (Public Domain).
  • Source (Scalable Vector Graphics, created with Inkscape) and generated files can be found here. Rooster, hen and penguin graphics come from the Open Clip Art project.
  • Contributed 3 reusable graphics (cottage, Christmas hat and pine tree) back to Open Clip Art.

New presentation

To make these wishes come true, Bootlin has also released a new presentation collecting the main strengths (and weaknesses too) of Free Software in embedded systems. It should help to make the decision to (or not to) rely on penguins in 2006 and in the years to come.

Free embedded Linux training: one year after

A summary of the improvements brought in 1 year to our free embedded linux training materials.

Since our first public release in October 2004, we made significant improvements to our free embedded Linux training materials:

  • The total number of slides increased from approximately 500 to more than 1000. Here are all available training materials and presentations.
  • New training materials: audio in embedded Linux systems, multimedia in embedded Linux systems.
  • New presentations: embedded Linux From Scratch… in 40 minutes, Linux on TI OMAP processors, free software development tools.
  • Added many sections, updates and improvements to our main document: embedded Linux kernel and driver development. If you haven’t checked it for 1 year, you will hardly recognize it!
  • Some of training labs now use the SkyEye emulator, which supports several arm boards. People can now practise with cross-compiling and booting the Linux kernel without having to purchase expensive development boards.
  • KernelKit, a live GNU/Linux distribution derived from Knoppix, was created for embedded systems and kernel developers. In particular, it includes uClibc cross-compiling toolchains for several platforms: arm, armeb, i386, m68k, mips, mipsel, ppc and sh4. KernelKit is used in our training labs.
  • The PDF versions of the documents now include internal and external hyperlinks, thanks to using OpenOffice.org 2.0. To navigate within the documents or to go to an external site, just click on the links in your favorite PDF reader.
  • Some utilities were created and shared with the community: clink (to compact cross-compiling toolchains), and cOOol (to report broken hyperlinks in OpenOffice.org documents).
  • The training materials were used for 12 training sessions delivered to embedded system companies and key silicon vendors.
  • The documents are now released under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution – ShareAlike 2.0 license, instead of the GNU Free Documentation License.
  • Some of the documents have been translated to French, German or Italian by several contributors.

Your corrections, suggestions, contributions and translations are welcome!

Introduction to the GNU/Linux and UNIX command line

Some of these documents are used in our training sessions. They are available under the Creative Commons BY-SA license (see details and other documents).

Here are the PDF versions:

Here are the source versions in OpenDocument Format:

Thanks to people who sent comments and corrections: Michael Kerrisk, Jim Donelson, Tyler Le, Laurent Thomas, Jeff Ghislain, Leif Thande, Frédéric Desmoulins, Przemysław Ciesielski

Free embedded Linux training materials

Bootlin embedded Linux training materials freely available

This was our first, initial annoucement in 2004. Since then, we have made huge improvements to our embedded Linux and Linux kernel and device driver development training courses. See all our training materials.

The 500 page materials of Bootlin’sembedded Linux training have just been published.

They are all released under the terms of the “GNU Free Documentation License (with no invariant sections).

Full training materials

Presentations