Slashdot Mirror
Which Embedded Linux Distribution?
Abhikhurana writes "I work for a company which designs a variety of video surveillance devices (such as MPEG4 video servers). Traditionally, these products have been based on proprietary OSs such as Nucleus and VxWorks. Now, we are redesigning a few of our products and I am trying to convince my company to go down the Linux route. Understandably, our management is quite skeptical about that and so I was asked by our CTO to recommend a few RTOSs which have mature networking stacks and which work well on ARM platform. I know that there are many embedded Linux based distributions out there. There are commercial ones such as Montavista, LynuxWorks, free ones such as uclinux, muLinux and some Linux like distros such as Ecos. What is the most stable and best community supported embedded Linux distribution out there?"
If their employment page is any indication, I'd say Ubuntu will be very soon.
... except with people saying things like this:
Just a friendly reminder, but don't forget to tell your higher-ups that using a *modified* Linux in their product means they have to release the source. Don't forget that, or you may be in for a nasty suprise.
How friendly/nasty of you. First, you assume the company is anal about the working of their systems or sharing kernel fixes and drivers. Second, it does not matter anyway. They can put all of the stuff they can't or don't want to share into code they don't share. The GPL does not force you to break MPEG4 NDAs, it won't publicize code you don't mix in, or steal your wife. All it does is make sure you pass on the same rights for code that's not yours that others passed onto you. The GPL encourages people to share but it never forces an issue. To draw GPL ire, you have to close off someone else's code.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
On an embedded system, you probably don't need anything running but the kernel, udev, and your application. You don't need most of your libraries; it's going to be more efficient to statically link everything. You don't need bash. You don't need Python. You don't need a package manager. For this task (networked cameras), you need ifconfig, a dhcp client, maybe a stripped Apache, and your custom application. And you can probably incorporate ifconfig / dhcp functionality into a library (take them from BSD or something licensed under LGPL) and put them in your application, which could also handle init if space is tight. (Though you probably don't want this, in case your appliance has to be reset.)
In short, while you can use Gentoo to build your target system, it won't effectively be Gentoo by the time you're finished. And it doesn't matter which distribution you choose at that point.
As I am sure you can guess, I'll answer with a simple answer, which likely means the most up front work but also the best capabilities. You'll want to build one yourself. This doesn't mean that you have to do all the work. As an example, I'll (obviously) use Gentoo. You install Gentoo and build your Gentoo-based distribution with exactly what you want in it. Since Gentoo is source-based to begin with, it should be easy to transition to your actual platform. Of course you won't want a C compiler and such on your actual platform, you do that on your development systems. This is really how most embedded Linux is done, with a development machine building the customized distribution for the actual release platform. I'll be honest and say that my experience with other embedded Linux is pretty much nil, but Gentoo will do what you want, and we have great community support. The nice thing about using Gentoo is it is basically the same thing as the normal distribution, and we support the platforms used for most embedded devices. Of course, you'll want to use what suits your needs best.