[Novalug] Need embedded distro recommendation; also possibly free parts to be had

[Joshua Newton]

On Mon, 19 Oct 2009 22:37 -0400, "Bryan J Smith" <b.j.smith at ieee.org>
wrote:
> On Mon, 2009-10-19 at 19:19 -0400, Joshua Newton wrote:
> > Um... all good distros, I'm sure, but I don't want to *develop* an
> > embedded distro.  I want to *use* one.  That means not pulling Fedora or
> > whichever out of the box and fiddling about with tmpfs and symlinks and
> > figuring out what bits of /var need to be nonvolatile and that.
> 
> So you want a distro to decide all that for you (?).  I'm missing
> something here.

I want (need, mostly) the distro to be fixed (I think that's the
adjective I want) and ready to go onto a write-limited medium.  No
splashing whatnot in /var and me having to decide, almost certainly
post-install, that, i.e., /var/lib/dpkg stays on flash and /var/log goes
into tmpfs (just in case).  I'd like the filesystem layout to be sane to
start, at least, and maybe even for an installer to ask, "Would you like
to a) keep logs b) sort of keep logs c) push logs to _____ server?"  I'm
spending too much time on other projects to hand-hold and/or
periodically rewrite bits of a distro come [package?] upgrade time.

I'm pretty sure there are some distros out there that already handle a
lot of this.  I thought RouterOS was one, but that's still payware.  I'm
pretty sure there's at least one snap-together-blocks distro that I
could *eventually* find again, but of course I don't know anyone who's
used it.  And there's stuff like Puppy Linux, that already seems to have
been strongly optimized toward embedded use-- and I don't know anyone
who would recommend it, either.  Hence my request for recommendations
for embedded-target distros.

> I mean, there's no "universal installer" for, say, any given ARM
> platform, because there's no "BIOS" or other "standard."  Embedded is
> about a few details with the boot/storage (typically via uboot, but
> there are other options) and going from there.

Good point.  I probably want to stick with x86, unless I happen to
stumble across something useful and frequently updated that was/is
intended for the Freescale plug-a-boards.  Ubiquiti RS/[Pro] seems
promising, but no one's collected on their (hefty) prize to make OpenWRT
less bad.

> If you just want a small x86 distro for x86, like a Via C3 or C7 or AMD
> Geode NX (mobile Athlon turned embedded, not to be confused with the
> Geode GX/LX which is different) or Intel Atom, then any x86 distro will
> do.  Stick with your preferred.

I'm aware of the Geode differences.  Rather find something with a C7 or
Nano so I can at least *use* the crypto accel...

Not really, no.  Fedora and CentOS seem impossible to strip of all the X
cruft without losing lots of useful CLI tools.  There's Ubuntu Server,
but that would, again, require significant retooling to go onto flash
media without an awful lot of hand-holding (on my part).