[linux-dvb] Re: Hello

[Rene Bartsch <ml@bartschnet.de>]

Am Sam, 2003-06-21 um 19.54 schrieb Brian Korsedal:
> It would be cheaper and perform better than our current product.  By
> cheaper, I mean a lot cheaper.  We do all custom electronics for our
> devices and they cost at least $10,000 to produce.

Take a PC, 5 DVB-budget cards (-S, -C or -T), a 1000BaseT-NIC and you
will be less than 1500 $/Euro - streaming five complete transponders or
UHF/VHF-channels into network (which means about 75 TV channels at the
same time).

> 
> Would Debian or Suse be good distributions for this project?

You shouldn't use Susi. It's good for brain-dump customers (a lot of
assistants, ...) but it's nicely integrated and they don't keep to the
standards (paths, ...). It's the Windoze in Linux-world.

Debian is quite good, especially as you can setup your distro by need
with the apt-get installer. But you have to configure everything by your
own.

I myself have decided for Mandrake, as they keep to the standards (it's
based on RedHat, but much more current and they provide correct
kernel-sources), have a lot of assistants and a quite good
package-management with online-update/install. So you can work deep in
the system or let assistants do the job.

If you want to setup a embedded system with PC-components, I'd suggest
you to use "Linux from Scratch" (http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/). The
pages provide the neccesary sources and documentation to setup a
complete linux-distro, which can be expanded by need.

This way you won't have any licence and fee problems with distributors
but a cost-free, self-made distro. And you can setup that distro
minimized to your needs (e.g. keeping below 15 MByte booting from a
compact flash if you don't want the gigabytes of a distro).

Rene



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