[chbot] Lightweight Linux,and serial

[Mark Atherton]

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