Building on its experience with the POSIX operating system, Lynx has developed BlueCat Linux, a version of Linux that's been optimized for embedded applications. In an announcement, company executives said Lynx will begin shipping BlueCat as an open source product by June of next year.

At the time of the BlueCat release, Lynx will also release version 4.0 of its LynxOS, which will have full binary compatibility with Linux due to its POSIX-based design. Near term, Lynx has released a version of its open development environment, originally available only on Windows, for use with Red Hat Linux, and is investing in new technical support, consulting and training services for Linux developers working in embedded applications.

Bill Hogan, president and chief executive officer of Lynx, said the move to support Linux is "perfectly logical" for his company, given its 12-year history of support for industry standards such as POSIX. But rather than develop a totally new version of Linux, BlueCat will be based on Red Hat Version 6.1, containing the Linux 2.2.5-15 kernel. The difference will be in Lynx's open development environment, which developers will be able to use to create variations of the embedded Linux operating system according their particular requirements.

In mid-2000, Lynx will release LynxOS 4.0, a multi-threaded, full-featured operating system, capable of running Linux applications for hard real-time, embedded applications, including Linux drivers, protocol stacks and other software applications, the company said.