Distro recommendation for development use

[QF006]

Hi, I am going to order a Shuttle SG41J1 barebones system to run Linux on. I have done a search here and also went through the suggested distro quizzes, but the results were not very congruent .

My uses are to use the box as both, a server system and as a desktop system. What I want to use it for includes:

1. Desktop application development
2. 64-bit development including C++/STL/etc.
3. Device Driver development

The reason that I list these development activities are more for my 'educational' use to improve my skills where they lack a bit.

I will use the box both as a desktop system, with access probably via VNC or RDP (don't have a KVM or multiple screens) and also as a server where I want access to it via SSH or Telnet (LAN only) and Samba.

I will need to use the GNU tool chain (gcc etc.) and also want to use Qt for desktop applications.

So what distribution would be best for my use, please ?

Cheers,
Siggy

[MikeTbob]

Any distro should work. I would just install my favorite distro and customize it from there until you find what works best for you.

[GNU-Fan]

I use Debian GNU/Linux for this. There might be better ones, but I am too lazy to try out others.

[PrinceSharma]

As per my knowledge , if you will go for any RedHat based distro, you will not regret , rather you'll enjoy. Scientific Linux is pretty stable ; suits as per your requirement.

[coopstah13]

if you are only remote accessing it anyway, then i would give thought to using something like vmware esxi and having it be all virtualized, then you can create a bunch of VM's of different distros to do what you want, only limitation is your disk and memory

[Rubberman]

I have a system that I use for just these purposes that you mention. I am running CentOS 5 on it (community version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux). I do application, driver, and embedded development on it (using an ARM tool-chain). It is a fully 64-bit system with 3 versions of the gnu compiler suites installed (3.4, 4.1, and 4.4) so I can deal with most any client need. I also use it to run virtual machines in order to do Solaris kernel/driver development, which works just fine with VirtualBox, along with Windows XP in a VM for WIndows software development and one application I use that only runs on Windows. I've been using it for a bit over 2 1/2 years and it has been exceptionally stable. I also use it for video processing tasks as well as audio playback.

[QF006]

Thanks to all who replied, and special thanks to 'Rubberman' for all the details, which looks quite similar to what I want to do. In the meantime I have prepared disks with Fedora (something RedHat based as 'PrinceSharma' suggested). If that does cause trouble with my box (system is up, but still waiting for the processor) then I will try CentOS 5 (didn't know about that one, too many flavours to choose from ).

It's getting a bit off-topic, but for driver development, is there some way of modelling a driver's H/W for a VM so driver development/debugging could be done in a VM ?

[Rubberman]

It's getting a bit off-topic, but for driver development, is there some way of modelling a driver's H/W for a VM so driver development/debugging could be done in a VM ?

Some drivers you can test in a VM, such as file systems or USB devices that the VM software can pass thru to the guest OS. A lot of hardware devices, such as PCI bus devices are not so amenable, so they need to be developed on the hardware itself. You can write the software in a guest OS, but you would not be able to test it there. In my case I have a removable system drive so I get a disc to install the test OS on, leaving the driver code on a common non system drive (/home) so it is accessible for all Linux operating systems I can boot.