Hello all,

Our platform is a PC/104 (x86) with additional boards (analog and digital I/O, serial ports, ethernet, etc.) The manufacturer provides Linux drivers for all the modules.

We are thinking of using gentoo as OS. Do you know what are the advantages/disadvantages of using this Linux distribution over the others? (Suse, Ubuntu, Redhat, etc.) any recommendation for an embedded OS?

And if so, what development tools should I use to develop my applications?

Thank you in advance!

Check out the 'CLFS' project under 'LFS' (www.linuxfromscratch.org).

The problem with just about ANY distribution is that your system will be bloated with package managers, GNU libc, and numerous other things. If you build from scratch you can have an awful lot of tools etc (and only the tools that are absolutely essential), all crammed into under 15MB (about 6MB compressed). It's just that it takes a lot of time to sort the software out ... one at a time. Using a distro you can push something out the door in under a week - if you don't mind the bloat wasting space on your CF card.

The other advantage of building yourself is that you have a greater choice of target processor. If, for example, you want to run on an ARM machine, then building from a distro limits your choices (Debian has packages for ARM, and Gentoo probably does too).

I don't know anything about PC/104 other than that it's a standard of some sort. What are the specifications of that thing?
What are you going to do with it?

"I don't know anything about PC/104 other than that it's a standard of some sort."

It's the shape, size of board, the stacking connectors used, and specs on the electrical signals. It's commonly used in industrial gear; see www.winsystems.com if you want to see some pictures (they also have briefs of the specs).