CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c++linuxembedded
rocknroll
rocknroll

Reputation: 1120

linux distro for Embedded development?

I have an embedded board . Can someone suggest an Ideal Linux distro for such a configuration, keeping in mind that it also needs to capture images in realtime. I plan to use Qt_Embedded for application development on such a system.

Upvotes: 3

Views: 2407

Answers (6)

Yann Ramin
Yann Ramin

Reputation: 33197

For true embedded, I suggest something based upon OpenEmbedded, such as Angstrom.

However, a 1GHz board with 512MB of RAM is hardly embedded. I'd suggest Debian.

Upvotes: 2

Rod Nussbaumer
Rod Nussbaumer

Reputation: 21

It isn't clear whether you are asking about a distro to host your development environment, or a distro to run on the target (or both). The two are near opposite ends of the spectrum. Some people find it acceptable to develop on the target, but I try to avoid that. If you are going to build your own toolchain, the distro you use for development may end up being dictated by the toolchain and/or the toolchain builder. It is often the case that embedded targets have completely different CPU and other architecture from the development host where their software is created (cross-development).

Embedded targets tend to be resource constrained, have very specific, unchanging hardware, and may have special vendor-supplied drivers, libraries, and bootloaders (board support package). It is not uncommon to develop a special minimalist Linux to deploy on embedded targets, in order to maximize performance and minimize cost.

Upvotes: 2

Jack
Jack

Reputation: 1438

I have used AstLinux with VIA board. It worked really well. It was very specific to VoIP though. Have a look: http://www.astlinux.org/

Upvotes: 0

vitaly.v.ch
vitaly.v.ch

Reputation: 2532

I prefer debian

Upvotes: 1

steveha
steveha

Reputation: 76755

You can get special distros of Linux that are specifically intended for embedded development from various companies.

However, the board you are describing sounds like it might be a standard x86 board. Is it a Via C7, or an Atom, or something like that? If it is, you could totally just use Debian. With Debian, you can start with the bare, base system, and just add the packages you want.

Even if your board is not x86, Debian supports a really wide range of architectures; you ought to check and see if Debian would work for you.

I talked to someone who worked at a company that produced embedded systems, and he told me they started off with a heavyweight distro (Red Hat, it might have been) and later tried to pare away the fat. He told me that was really painful to do, and he wished they had just used Debian and started with the bare minimum Debian packages.

Here's a web page I found describing a minimum Debian install.

http://users.telenet.be/mydotcom/howto/linux/debian_minimal.htm

Upvotes: 3

Nicolas Goy
Nicolas Goy

Reputation:

I'd suggest a minimalistic debian or http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/.

Here we use ARM board for embedded system from http://www.embeddedarm.com/ their linux is very light and based on debian and linux from scratch.

They have linux solutions for both ARM and x86, and I think they are free for use even on other boards.

http://www.embeddedarm.com/software/solutions-x86.php#linux

Upvotes: 0

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