The consortium, which now claims some 70 corporate members, also made final preparations for next week's Comdex trade show, putting out a call for volunteers — of which there are plenty in the Linux world — to staff an information kiosk at the show's Linux Business Expo. "Let's show Comdex what we, and embedded Linux, are all about," said Inder Singh, board chairman and ELC president. "The opportunity is to create greater awareness of Linux's benefits and create market momentum, and the responsibility is to avoid the pitfalls for a fledgling industry, such as what we witnessed with the recent Unix wars."

The implications of a Unix-like "forking," or fragmenting, of Linux were brought home by chief technology officer Tim Bird of Lineo (Salt Lake City). In a keynote address at the conference, Bird asserted that the open-source developer community cannot fulfill all of the embedded market's needs, because the "network effects" that drive open-source development tend to be reduced in many areas of embedded technology. By that, Bird meant that developers of common interest tend to talk only among themselves, spawning isolated microcommunities of developers for specific, narrow tasks. That can fragment a development language and keep it from being standardized across applications.

Although forks that needlessly diminish the network effects of community development are undesirable, forks that specialize Linux for markets it could not otherwise serve are beneficial (Linus Torvalds, the inventor of Linux, calls them "non-overlapping"). Such forks should be encouraged, not avoided, said Bird. The Lineo CTO will deliver the same message to a Comdex audience next week.

IBM's commitment to Linux hints at the potential scope of the operating system. Research teams at the company are working to show how Linux can be used across platforms, from large supercomputer clusters to small intelligent devices.

In the latter category is an IBM wristwatch that debuted at the Linux 2000 conference in August and was also shown at the Embedded Linux conference. In his keynote presentation, Alex Morrow, an IBM fellow at the T.J. Watson Research Center (Yorktown Heights, N.Y.), talked in detail about the smart watch.

Designed to communicate wirelessly with PCs, cell phones and other wireless devices, the unit can receive e-mail messages and provide time, calendar, address book and to-do-list functions. It has 8 Mbytes of flash memory and 8 Mbytes of DRAM. Users interact with the device through both touch and a roller wheel. The watch has both IR and RF wireless connectivity.

The watch is 56 mm wide by 48 mm long by 12.25 mm thick, weighs 44 grams and works off a rechargeable lithium-polymer battery. IBM researchers are successfully running Linux and X11 (a popular graphics library) on the device.

"With Linux rapidly becoming an industry standard, it's important that developers be able to create new applications across all platforms, including pervasive devices, and the intent of IBM's research is to further that work," said Morrow. Enhancements to the watch will include a high-resolution screen and applications that will allow it to be used as an access device for various Internet-based services, such as up-to-the-minute information about weather, traffic conditions, the stock market, sports results and so on.

Several benefits accrue from the use of Linux in small pervasive devices. The availability of source code and of a well-understood application-programming environment makes it easy for students, researchers and software companies to add features and develop applications, according to IBM.

Conference speaker Stuart Anderson, Technical Director for X Window System Products at Metro Link Inc. (Fort Lauderdale, Fla.), explored alternative approaches to implementing graphical and windowing environments in Linux-based systems. He focused on how X Window system technology can be a viable solution and listed a survey of available GUI tool kits.Anderson has been working with X Window for 14 years, including work on an embedded system back when thin clients were called X terminals.