I am a student doing my final (undergraduate) project with Video for Linux. All I have to do is keep a stream of video in RAM, in a circular buffer, then in response to a trigger write it to disk. 1. Performance is one of the things I am going to study. Does anyone know off the top of their head what format and what sort of rate could be managed by a K6-200, 66MHz SDRAM, a PCI bus and a generic BT878 card? Which is most likely to be the bottleneck? Does the BT878 use DMA? (I need to know if I am going to have to upgrade my hardware) 2. I need Xwindows to view my output files to ensure I am not corrupting or losing data. My software itself does not need graphics. What is a relatively lightweight 'window manager' and 'widgets/toolkit' combination that will work with V4L samples? The one I have now with Debian is superbly fast and simple but I can't even tell what it's called. If anyone could just *name* a no-nonsense X windows setup I'll install it and figure it out. * What is a really lightweight X windows manager/toolkit combo that will work with V4L2? * I can get by without Gnome and KDE can't I? 3. Can anyone recommend a good IDE? At this stage I am using 'nano' and a make file. 4. Distribution: This isn't really a 'basic question', but here goes. I have tried Red Hat and Debian. People say Redhat is buggy and I don't have time to find my way around bugs so I thought I would look for a 'programmers' distribution, as opposed to one loaded with 'features'. Online reviews suggested Slackware (but it's complex/for hackers), Suse (large and can't afford it) and Debian. So now I have Debian. This was a mistake. Debian does things differently to everyone else, which makes most online documentation (like the Kernel Howto) unhelpful. When I get stuck I have 4 times as much to read... * What is a free, simple, standard, no-nonsense distro? * What are you using? * What would you chose if you were in my situation? I am obviously incompetent at choosing a distro, please just tell me. I will go back to Red Hat if someone could suggest which packages I should skip to avoid clutter? My plan is to upgrade and reinstall my system for the last time. Then I hope I can spend more time working and less reading! Thanks, all thoughts appreciated, David Lions
