MontaVista Software develops systems software, development tools and Embedded Linux-based software targeting consumer electronics which includes automotive electronics, communications equipment, and television set-top boxes and other connected devices and infrastructure. It is based in Sunnyvale, California and was founded in 1999 by James "Jim" Ready (previously at Mentor Graphics and creator of VRTX) and others.

Their more famous products include:

• MontaVista Linux, a version of Linux that has been enhanced to become a fully fledged real-time operating system. The core changes done by MontaVista have been made by Robert M. Love and submitted back to the Linux kernel. Ultimately some of these changes have served as a motivating factor in the development of newer features in the mainstream Linux stable kernel 2.6 series. This Linux distribution is available in three editions: Professional Edition, Carrier Grade Edition and Consumer Electronics Edition. The MontaVista Linux toolkit includes specific code libraries to easily migrate from old designs using the Wind River Systems' VxWorks and the pSOS operating systems.
• MontaVista Graphics is a graphic toolkit based on the smallX (previously tinyX) implementation of the X Window System, GTK (including Pango and ATK ), FreeType, and IceWM.
• MontaVista DevRocket is an integrated development environment based on Eclipse.

Montavista has historically had strong connections with PowerPC Linux development, and host a development Linux kernel source tree on source.mvista.com. Today, Montavista Linux powers a large number of Linux based Smartphones and other consumer electronics, as well as larger embedded devices.

MontaVista Linux was used in the Motorola A760 and Motorola A768i phones by Motorola. This was despite the fact that Motorola was a founding member of a competing OS, the Symbian OS, released in February 16, 2003 to the China market. This was also the first time Linux was used on a mobile phone. The MontaVista Linux distribution is a very popular Linux distribution in consumer electronics and in Japan. Another of their products is DevRocket, an IDE based on Eclipse, an open source IDE. Both are based on Java. IDE runs on Linux, Solaris and Windows. It features a C Development Toolkit (CDT).

Mobile phones using MontaVista Linux

• Motorola A760
• Motorola A768i
• Motorola A780
• Motorola E680
• NEC N900iL
• NEC N901iC
• Panasonic P901i

See also

• Comparison of Linux distributions

External link

• MontaVista