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Hi,

Zach Deedler wrote:
> REQUIREMENTS
> 1) render fast

This is given by the drivers and the graphic card you have, Linux distro
choice has no impact on it - drivers are the same, impact of the rest is
negligible. Of course, once you start paging heavily matters could
change, but any reasonably recent distro will do well. You are going to
see far larger differences due to different choice of disks and amount
of RAM than the choice of distro.

Even the most heavily optimized distros such as Gentoo gain you at most
5-10% extra performance at the risk of incompatibilities, maintenance
nightmares and bugs due to use of experimental gcc features. Not really
worth the hassle.

One thing to avoid in general is ATI hardware because their drivers have
poor performance in Linux.

Also, you will want recent version of Xorg, there were quite a few
improvements.

> 2) boot fast

What is fast? Most current distros boot on reasonable hardware under
20-30 seconds. If you customize it by disabling of unneeded things, not
relying in DHCP (could take time), not waiting for network being up,
etc. you can still bring this down. If it is not sufficient, you can
always use suspend/resume or a hardcore solution such as solid state
(Flash) disks. The question is what exactly do you need?

> 3) easy to maintain

Essentially anything will do, depending on your skills. Distros such as
Gentoo, Debian or Slackware are probably not the best unless you are
familiar with the guts of the system to a large detail already but give
you the most flexibility. On the other hand, Suse, Ubuntu, Mandriva,
Redhat/Fedora, etc. give you more utilities to set things up.

> QUESTIONS
> 1) Best distribution for my requirements?

The requirements are too vague and there are way too many distros to
recommend. Have a look at http://distrowatch.com/

> 2) Best windowing toolkit for rendering osg fast, if it matters for full
> screen? (ie. kde, gnome, etc.)

Not relevant - this is influenced only by graphic drivers, the rendering
 is never managed by things such as KDE. One exception is Xgl if you
want to use eye candy such as Beryl or Compiz, then the rendering is
going through a proxy and some impact can be expected. However, that is
probably not what you are looking for.

> 3) Best compiler version for osg?  Is gcc >=4.0 good?

Are you kidding? If you want to use C++, you must use 4.x series of
compilers. The old 3.x does not even support some things required by the
standard, not to mention some grave bugs. Moreover, the 4.x series is
out for two years now and extensively tested.

> 4) Best kernel version for osg?

It is not relevant. Anything reasonably recent will do, the constraint
is the support for the latest Nvidia drivers.

> 5) We are currently planning on using the crux linux distribution at the
> moment?  Any bad/good experiences?  http://crux.nu/ 

Not too known, you may have issues with things such as training of
admins for on-site deployment, training of users and such.

> 6) For osg development, I'd like to use Suse.  Is it risky to mix
> distributions?

Not really, but be prepared to have to recompile when deploying to a
different distro and sometimes have to deal with problems, such as
different library versions and different path to things, such as
libraries or header files. Nothing crazy, though. It is not *that much*
different but occasionally issues happen.

I am developing on 32bit Mandriva 2001 and deploying to 64bit Mandriva
2006 on different hardware without too much hassle. However, you need to
setup a sane working environment - put dependencies in the same places,
automate as much as possible to minimize the required manual work, etc.

> 7) Does redhawk linux get you anything with osg?

I do not think so. Unless you need hard realtime for dealing with
specific hardware, there is little use for it - the standard OpenGL
drivers nor other software (Xorg, etc.) are not able to utilize it. More
likely than not you are going to have problems because of this
(non-standard kernels, not officially supported by Nvidia, etc.)

Regards,

Jan

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