Congrats on your Winter 2000 issue. I particularly liked the ``Embedded Design with the MZ104'' feature by Doug Stead and Shane Luttrell's ``Trying Embedded Linux: Converting an Embedded DOS SONAR System to Linux''. You've taken a wonderfully practical and hands-on stance. The contest is a great lead-off. Bummer only every two months! I'd pay for this subscription.

Good luck,

--Martin Crundallac6rm@earthlink.net

I Am Excited to See What's Next...

I am delving into microelectronics on my own at home, and never did I think I'd be able to build my own gear.

Keep up the good work; home enthusiasts like me need all the help we can get.

--Mothermother4@sympatico.ca

I have read my Embedded Linux Journal from cover to cover and it's great!

I have been using the Lineo Embedix Linux SE that came free with their demo for about a week now. I have one question that maybe you can help me out with. It might even inspire you to write an article. Project SCADA: I want to use a script to enable two or three C programs to run in the background. These C programs will control slow I/O. The main program that is running in the foreground will communicate to these independent programs through global variables. I do not want to open and close files for communications. I would like to use global variables or some other method. How would one go about this?

--Mark A. FioreFiore_Mark@emc.com

Sounds like you might be able to do it with named pipes. Check out one of our favorite books, Linux Application Development, by Michael K. Johnson and Erik W. Troan. A web page about the book is at http://people.redhat.com/johnsonm/lad/contents.html and the ISBN is 0-201-30821-5. Watch embedded.linuxjournal.com for an embedded development forum where you can ask or answer questions like this one.

--Editor

You offer us a chance of winning an MZ104 board, but do not give us a chance of buying the same development kit! I'd really like to play with a system like this, but I have no specific ideas. Is there a way that we can buy the same kit that is offered as a prize?

--Ian McAfeemcafee@wco.com

We have contacted Doug Stead at Tri-M about making the kit available for sale. They are looking into it and expect to be able to offer it at a good price, to be announced at the same time as the 100 winners. The kits for purchase will also likely include a CD loaded with instructions. The BlueCat, or similar, component will have to be purchased directly from LynuxWorks, however.

--Editor