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What Embedded Linux Distros Would You Support?

Posted by Cliff on from the top-of-the-embedded-pile dept.

dannys42 asks: "I work for a cool company that works with, among other things, embedded Linux systems. We'd like to provide an SDK for our customers and will likely support one or two Linux distros, plus Windows+Cygwin as build environments. Up until now, I'd assumed that most corporate developers were using Fedora, simply because of its similarity to Red Hat Enterprise and for its maturity. However, I'm curious to know, for those fortunate enough to develop for embedded Linux, what distribution do you expect to be supported for a build environment?"

5 of 83 comments (clear)

  1. Debian by halfnerd · · Score: 2, Informative

    And with just some extra care also Ubuntu/Kubuntu/Xubuntu/gNewSense...

  2. Did you already look around on linuxdevices.com? by modir · · Score: 2, Informative

    I can't really tell which distro you should choose. But I can give you an advice to look around on http://www.linuxdevices.com/. There you have the best overview on what is going on in the embedded Linux market. (imho)

  3. Re:No discrimination by BigBuckHunter · · Score: 2, Informative

    Simple: Any. There isn't a reason why it shouldn't work on all distro's

    Support != work

    The gentleman is asking which OS's his company should develope, QA and release for. No matter if it's a paid or free support offering, it would be logical for them to pick the distros that represent the majority of the marketshare for embedded device development. It probably mirrors the most popular distros out there (i think Fed/RH, Deb/Ub, and Suse). This way they maximize their coverage and income and minimize the support costs (especially dev and QA).

    BBH

  4. I recommend... by helmutvs · · Score: 2, Informative

    MontaVista Linux. I work for a large networking company that uses this as the embedded OS in our switches - it is very reliable. It's not free, however, but this distro is used in several industries and by many other successful companies. They also provide good support. Here's a list of boards and platforms supported by MontaVista. Hope this helps you.

    --
    There are no uninteresting things. There are only uninterested people.
  5. Some clarifications by dannys42 · · Score: 2, Informative

    When I speak of "support" for a distribution I'm talking more about testing to ensure the SDK works out of the box. I have no intention of forcing our SDK to be tied to any given distribution. And I agree it'd be great if it worked on all distros. But the fact is, it's unreasonable for most companies to test across many distros and versions of distros like that, especially ones that actual developers in our market don't use. Hence my initial question... (which ones do people use?)

    Also, when I talk about the SDK, I'm not speaking mearly of tarballs of C compilers and libraries. There's a number of convenience scripts and tools we've added to give you a nice easy to use development environment. This of course relies on a number of system tools and libraries being available. Some of them standard, some not.

    I can of course add these tools as part of the SDK. But going that route quickly ends up in making your own distribution. At this point it makes sense to just take a distribution and use that.