[chbot] Lightweight Linux,and serial

[Geoff]

Any reason you want it to be lightweight? Do you have disk space/rocessor
speed limitations? My suggestion isn't "light" by the traditional senses,
but it's the linux I suggest to people for general use because it performs
very well even on older hardware. It's Linux Mint XFCE edition.

If you're wanting something really lightweight, try Archlinux. If the
installation procedure is too hard, use ArchBang, which comes with (gasp) a
menu based installer and a light weight graphical interface.

I've had no issues with serial performance on linux in python (pyserial
module). Out of the box it was fast enough and reliable enough that we used
multiple USB->UART converters on Dave
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJ8BJNaI8bA>. There were six of
them talking in real time between the main computer and the various
microprocessors dotted around. We were talking at 115.2k baud (six times in
parallel), so 57.6kb shouldn't be an issue. The main computer there ran
Ubuntu, because we couldn't get the latest version of ROS to work on Linux
Mint.


Geoffrey



On Tue, May 30, 2017 at 6:45 AM, Mark Atherton <markaren1 at xtra.co.nz> wrote:

> Hi All,
>
> Just about to start poking serial commands at the Pan and Tilt head
> (following on from a posting here, maybe a month ago), and would like
> suggestions about a lightweight Linux distro to create the test patterns
> from.
>
> The P&T unit has an unknown control protocol, but am pretty sure that the
> signalling is RS232. There are at least three possible protocols, so need
> an easy way to generate test data, and to examine returned serial data.
>
> How well / simply implemented / fully buffered is serial data managed when
> the OS receives (binary) messages ?
>
> Basically plan to send out a test message, wait maybe 20ms, then see if
> any data has been received. If data is present, then dump it out as hex, if
> not, then move onto the next test message.
>
> Since this is close to being a real-time application, am concerned about
> of ease of checking for incoming messages, and of course, the possibility
> of incoming bytes getting dropped.
>
> Messages each way are likely to be short (less than 10 bytes), and at low
> speed (less than 57.6k baud).
>
> So, need a (preferably) lightweight Linux distro, which can be installed
> on a laptop reasonably quickly, preferably has GCC pre-installed, and is
> capable of being easily controlled from a win7 machine via a readily
> available (free) remote desktop.
>
> Thoughts, comments, and observation please.
>
> -Mark
>
>
>
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