Ubuntu versus Fedora for cross-development host

If you are familiar with Fedora, why are you seeking to change distributions?

I would say both distributions are very mainstream, but the userbase of Fedora is probably slightly larger.

I have long used and prefer Debian on headless systems and running as VMWare virtual machines. Ubuntu is Debian based, so if I go to Ubuntu for a graphics rich Debian environment running Eclipse and other GUI cross-development tools, I might like the Ubuntu/Debian environment better than Fedora (apt-get versus RPM/yum, etc.).

The counter-argument might be that Ubuntu targets desktop users and is a platform for delivering eye-candy and lots of MP3 players, but is not a serious cross-development platform in a commercial setting.

I can just try it and see what I like best, but I thought some embedded users out there might be using Ubuntu for cross-development already, and share their recommendations.

I do and I switched from Debian to Ubuntu recently. I got used to apt-get and didn't want to relearn. I mostly use an Eclipse-based IDE for embedded development.

I did have to mess around to get USB drivers for my JTAG debugger to work since the embedded tool vendor officially didn't support Ubuntu. I had to hand-edit some udev rules and permissions to get it going but first I had to learn what udev is.

Just out of curiosity - what would make one distribution more or less palatable to you?

Andrew

Yes. No. If paid user support is of high interest, then Fedora might be of more interest.

That's a little hard to express.

Red Hat was my favorite in the early days, when the spirit of the product was driven by developers scratching their own itch. I almost dropped out after using Red Hat 7 and 8, but returned for Red Hat 9, which was excellent.

I was disappointed when Red Hat shifted their focus, there was no Red Hat 10, and they made a half-hearted effort at spinning out Fedora Core. I switched to Debian at home (Sarge and Etch), and have been very happy. Debian still seems to be made by people with talent, who are motivated by engineering excellence.

I have continued to use Fedora at work, and it is fine, but there is something about it that smacks of 'me too', and second best. I haven't used Ubuntu, but I am drawn to it because it is Debian based, and it seems to have a very large and enthusiastic user community.

I prefer Debian headless (ssh/telnet, vim, and command line tools), but Eclipse GUI single-step debugging wrapped around gdb/gdbserver makes a Linux GUI interesting for cross-development. (I prefer printf for debugging, but I need to set up Eclipse GUI debugging for some other folks.) So if I need to go with a GUI, then I am attracted to Debian based Ubuntu, but in the end I will probably stay with Fedora since it is mainstream, and a shorter hop to Red Hat Enterprise Linux when that is necessary.

Thanks to all who responded.

I mainly use Ubuntu for my machines (avr & arm cross devel) , but depending on needs i would suggest to have a look at CentOs (witch essentialy is a RH Enterprise server).

You would keep the redhat interface (yum tec.) , and afaik. if you change one line in CentOs , to say its a Redhat Enterprise. Then all the commercial packages like Xilinx Webpack etc. Installs cleanly as they beleive they are on a RHE server.

Regards Carsten