Hello! I'm working on a robot for a FIRST team, and this year we would like to have an on-board computer to do vision processing (from four Microsoft Kinects). Somebody told me that there are Linux distributions whose entire purpose is to boot up quickly and execute a single program (in this case OpenCV). I was wondering if anyone happens to know of such a distribution. So far, what I've found is that there are highly stripped-down distributions which, like any distribution, can be made to run programs automatically at startup. I'm not sure what to pick.... Thanks!

p.s We've got a Mini-ITX motherboard, 4.1ghz CPU, 32 Gb of RAM, and a 50Gb SSD, just in case you were wondering. It's a fully functioning desktop.

I usually use something custom made when I have to build a single purpose distribution, based on Slackware's initrd. Other than that You can go for Tinycore/Microcore or use Slitaz, or just a base system of an all purpose distribution, like Debian, which you customize.

If you're not familiar with Linux, then Tiny Core is probably the best idea. You just get Linux, with a very basic GUI and command line. Micro Core has no GUI.

I might suggest Gentoo and build a system exactly for your hardware and timing needs. More work but maybe more control would be linux from scratch.

In a real world operation, I'd consider QNX.

Since you'd have to port some stuff to QNX, I'd think about some embedded version of windows. The replacement for CE is pretty darn fast.