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?"

Comments

Why??

[sunderland56]

Why do you want to do this? Sure, it's "cool" and you'll get modded up for life on /. - but is it a wise decision?

With Nucleus, for example, you spend 99.9% of your time writing/testing your own code. You're on a solid, well-known base that you have prior experience with. Clearly your management has no problems with their licensing scheme or pricing.

If you go to linux, you'll get:

1. A learning curve - things work differently, and all the function names are different.
2. You spend some significant time configuring and compiling a Linux distribution. On your second project this may take a minor amount of time - but on your first project, it will take longer than you think.
3. You need to worry (and involve the corporate lawyers) about licensing.
4. If you want any support, you need to pay - so there may not actually be any cost difference. (If you already have a site license for Nucleus, then Linux would be more expensive).

I'm not saying that Linux is necessarily bad here.... just that it may not be the nirvana that you think.