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According to IHL Consulting Group's 2003 Unlocking POS Study, Linux use within POS terminals has increased 35%.
Retail Point Of Sale (POS) terminals just got an upgrade, thanks to the BlueCat® Linux® POS embedded operating system from LynuxWorks™.
BlueCat Linux POS offers the smallest memory footprint of any modern POS operating system. Use BlueCat Linux POS to program the latest POS terminals, or to give new life to older terminals that you thought were too memory-constrained to run a modern POS application.
Get the flexibility and cost benefits of open-source Linux. Applications built on BlueCat Linux POS preserve your software investment and can be ported to other Linux platforms later.
BlueCat Linux POS is an industrial-strength operating system environment that provides advanced and secure networking, X-Windows, JavaPOS, web server, and utilities and tools for immediate developer productivity. Optional Sun® Java™ and LynuxWorks embedded Java (for tighter memory requirements) are available with BlueCat Linux POS for the additional high-level portability that some applications require.
Based on the stable Linux 2.6 kernel, BlueCat Linux POS has passed LynuxWorks' proprietary Automated Test Suite (ATS) of over 130,000 tests (just like all our other operating systems). In fact, BlueCat Linux POS is subjected to the same rigorous ISO 9001:2000 test procedures that qualify our LynxOS real-time operating system, which is used in such safety-critical applications as flight avionics and medical systems.
BlueCat Linux POS support packages protect retailers for the long term. We cover you through deployment and development. Need to add a new scanner or RFID reader? LynuxWorks builds the new JavaPOS or I/O serial drivers to match. We take care of integration between the OS, POS terminal, and its I/O devices along the way, so that retailers don't have to.
And if you never need to upgrade, we'll always support whichever BlueCat Linux POS version you want—even if it is ten years old.
With over a decade and a half of experience in embedded operating systems, LynuxWorks has supported millions of deployed targets. Long-term support might be unprecedented in the retail industry, but it's just what our customers have come to expect.
Typically, more of a POS terminal's memory is consumed by the OS environment than by the application. BlueCat Linux POS, with its compact Linux build, frees up valuable memory so that a POS application can run at under 8 MB—or under 16 MB if it requires LynuxWorks embedded Java.
(Memory footprint size is influenced by the application. LynuxWorks and the POS application developer will be able to project and confirm the actual memory usage required for their applications. BlueCat Linux POS is also offered with a standard, non-royalty, desktop-like JVM which takes additional memory.)
BlueCat Linux POS' small footprint can enable a POS to run with FLASH memory instead of using hard drives, for improved reliability, faster application operation, reduced power consumption, and lower terminal cost.
BlueCat Linux POS creates a standardized environment that will run on many platforms. BlueCat-POS is uniquely qualified to run on processors other than x86 (e.g., Pentium®). For example, it will port to Intel®'s XScale® embedded processors, IBM® Power Architecture, ARM®, and most new processor technologies. We're here to make sure that your BlueCat Linux POS-based infrastructure gets carried forward to tomorrow.
BlueCat Linux POS is part of LynuxWorks' retail operating-system suite, which also includes BlueCat-Kiosk and BlueCat-RFID for commonality and compatibility amongst your POS, Kiosk, and RFID platform applications.
While the popular news media has drawn much attention to Linux's growth in server and desktop markets, Linux is actually much more popular in the embedded market.
In fact, Linux is now the dominant operating system within the embedded market.
The numbers speak for themselves. The embedded 32-bit processor market has over twenty times more deployments than desktop computers, and scales a wide range of applications (e.g., from MP3 players to telecommunication systems).
Embedded Linux is still a newcomer to the retail industry, but it seems only a matter of a short time before embedded Linux becomes the defacto POS OS standard as it has in other areas of embedded computing.
As a development platform, BlueCat Linux POS leads the industry. Our cutting-edge, cross-hosted development tools have grown out of our many years of experience and allow POS developers to:
POS developers get a familiar standards-based development environment with VisualLynux™, a plug-in which makes the popular Microsoft® Visual Studio.NET IDE available for BlueCat Linux POS development. After installation, developers skilled in C++/Visual Studio can proceed as usual, with the addition of all the commands and standard GNU tools they need to streamline the design and creation of applications targeted to run on BlueCat Linux POS. LynuxWorks' new Luminosity IDE is now available for Linux-based development.
POS developers can also take advantage of the first dynamically instrumented system trace analyzer, SpyKer™. Developed by LynuxWorks, the GUI-driven SpyKer removes the guesswork, labor, and time delays from event tracing so you can move higher quality products to market even more quickly. SpyKer allows developers to:
To find out more about BlueCat Linux POS and other retail products, please contact one of our Retail Sales Representatives.
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