On Friday 26 November 2004 00:59, Jay Moore wrote: > Foreword: I am soliciting informed opinions. It is NOT my intent to > start a holy war. > > I am fairly new to Linux, and not at all familiar with the strengths and > weaknesses of the various Linux distributions. I am starting a new > project that will require development of some embedded systems, and I am > therefore having to consider my options for a development system. > > My initial research led me to consider Debian (woody). However, it The debian folk do some fine work but the seem to confuse "stable" and "stagnant." Woody is years old, and because it's "stable" it doesn't get technology updates or even fixes for broken packages unless they're security concerns. Also, they're more concerned with the purity of their project than actually releasing stuff. However, they do have an enormous range of software: A full set of Woody binaries is seven CDs, and they supportjust about any computer you can find. There are derivitives of Debian of which Knoppix is probably the most famous, but that's more a demo system. A newer derivative is Ubuntu which (apart from partitioning( is easier to install than FC. It comes on a single CD (or you can download a single ISO), but pretty much all of Debian is built for Ubuntu and in its repositories. Oh, Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu Linux promises six-monhtly releases, and it's staffed with a few Debian Developers. I recommend you take a look at it. > didn't get along with my dev system hardware (a box I built myself). I > next tried FC2, and was amazed at the ease of installation, and the fact > that all of my hardware was detected and supported automatically. > However, after reading this list for a couple of weeks it seems that > there is not much discussion relevant to my intended usage > (x-development for embedded systems). You won't find that on any general-usage lists. For that kind of discussion you need to to find people talking abou ulinux, dietlibc and firmware for routers (linksys and dlink both use Linux in some of their products). > So, without further ado, I'd be interested in some opinions wrt FC2 (or > FC3 eventually) suitability for this role. I can provide more details on > the specifics of my project if that is relevant to the selection of a > paarticular distribution to support x-development. > > Finally, if there's a different list that's more relevant to this topic, > I'd also appreciate a pointer. I'd say that whatever benefits you expected in Woody you will see in Ubuntu: it's basically Debian with a support structure and regular (October and April) releases. -- Cheers John
