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I am a bit green on Linux in general. I have a BeagleBone that has Angstrom installed. I'd like to strip away as much as I can to get boot times down to a minimum. All I want it to do, is boot up - straight to an App.js or node-webkit (I believe there are pretty much the same?) application, displaying a Twitter Bootstrap HTML/CSS GUI.

A node.js application will be tied to this; and will be serving the very same page up via express.js.

So what does App.js/node-webkit 'need' to display itself? How does it work?

I am from a Microsoft background, so to display anything, in my mind, is you load the OS which has all the API's for display, and then you load the graphical application. Does the Linux kernel itself have this built in? Or do you need other 'packages'?

Would love a detailed answer to this; I've been running around the Internet for days.

mriksman
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If you are going to be running on embedded linux then chromium or other browser plus nodejs is going to be quite heavy -- I would guess around 64 Meg or so. On top of that you will then need to run an x environment / display server so you get the graphical GUI up and running.

If you want to take the easy way out find a ubuntu linux distribution for the board you are developing for. There are many other distributions and you are welcome to try them, but I do find that there are lots of blog posts and help for ubuntu linux. Once you have that working on your device you can then install nodejs and a browser to view it.

If you don't need to have a display connected to the device then you can just run nodejs and surf to the machine which can then run your application on port 80.

If you want to create an "embedded" application and go the more visual studio route then you can look at QT. There is BootToQT which should boot an android like device but then take over the screen and run your application: http://qt.digia.com/Product/Boot-to-Qt/. They also have chromium so it is possible embed an html view in your application http://qt-project.org/. The Qt apps can be built in C++ but I think they also have an xml like structure for defining interfaces. QT Designer gives you an IDE to develop in.

sihorton
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