linux distro for Embedded development?

Question

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.

Answer 1

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