In anticipation of getting my hands on a Beagleboard I need a bit of
advice on which PC Linux distro to use for developing and building
software for the Beagleboad and the OMAP35x.
I have previously worked with HPUX and AIX for many years but have
never used Linux on the PC platform. Which distros would you advise I
use?
Or can you develop on a PC running Windows? Are there any limitations
going down this route?
I would like to use Angstrom on the Beagleboard as it ties in with
another project I’m working on if that has any bearing on the choice.
I use openSUSE, but i am thinking on switching to something else. The
font rendering is just not that great... any tips on getting a good
looking distro that provides a watchable font set on lcd with wvga
screens?
Switched to ubuntu 8.04 today. I like it. It's easy to use, though the
no root account does get on my nerves at times, but after all is
configured all should work pretty well.
I'm a bit partial to Gentoo to be able to stay on the bleeding edge
without rebuilding my baseline all the time, but I've started using
Ubuntu for all of my demos because it is so popular. The "wubi" dual-
boot solution supported by Ubuntu is very nice, but I typically run it
under VMware. Without VMware, you won't be able to do kernel
development under Windows. If you don't care about kernel
development, you might be OK, as long as you don't depend on any
projects that require Linux to build.
I had faced some issues with Fedora on vmware with regard to network connectivity. However, I have found people being appreciative about Debian on vmware, although I haven’t tried it myself.
Thanks for your thoughts on the various Linux distro's.
I have previously used a Windows PC running a x-windows or a terminal
emulator software tool connected to a seperate UNIX box for
development. Is this way of working possible with fedora and ubuntu?
What are your experiences of running everything on one box with
vmware? Does the vmware route have any disadvantages?
You can totally just SSH into whatever flavor of Linux you want to do
your development on. All of the distros thusfar mentioned are really
easy to setup to allow remote SSH, most of them have options in the
installer to allow you to start the SSH server up on boot.
The advantage of running vmware is that you don't have to have a bunch
of computers laying around your house/office/whatever. If you have a
decently powerful notebook computer, you could build a handful of
other OS' in vmware on it and take that with you wherever you go - so
it would be super easy to go hang out in a coffee shop and work on
your projects.
The disadvantages of vmware largely boil down what type of resouces
you have avaliable and what type of projects you're working on. If
all you have is a dozen pentium 3 machines with 512megs of ram each,
vmware is going to be a bad experience for you - it would be a better
decision to just dedicated each machine to a particular operating
system. However, if you have a core2duo notebook with 4gigs of ram,
you're probably going to rave about how cool vmware is. FWIW, RAM is
generally more important when running things like vmware than CPU
power.
The non-licensed edition vmware uses only a single CPU for some stupid reason! + You need to be careful to backup your files etc.. as a colleague found out.. if Windows crashes/PC power died while ubuntu ran on vmware, well.. it did not save the files to the physical disk and boom.. all work lost..
I got a dual core + 2Gig RAM on my desktop and I can vouch that I do pretty fine (I take backups regularly to multiple machines - I shut down vmware every evening while I leave for home, so I have not had things quit on me.. *yet*!) ;).. One warning: 3+gig ram can only be used if you have a 64 bit OS. So don't order a machine with 4 Gig RAM and 32bit OS - you'd be disappointed (dumb personal experience).
Thanks for your thoughts on the various Linux distro's.
I have previously used a Windows PC running a x-windows or a terminal
emulator software tool connected to a seperate UNIX box for
development. Is this way of working possible with fedora and ubuntu?
What are your experiences of running everything on one box with
vmware? Does the vmware route have any disadvantages?
One major disadvantage is the need to split the memory between the two
operating systems that are running. Both would like to have all the
RAM, so you better have a system with enough RAM for each.
Performance is also somewhat of an issue. Even sharing monitor space,
despite being able to make the VM full-screen, is an occasional
annoyance.
Networking seems to have the biggest disadvantage to me, since you are
forced behind the VM's NAT or Bridge.