I will be designing an instrument panel for a vehicle to display the common gauges that you would find in a car - (speedometer, rpm, fuel level, oil pressure, etc.). We have selected a 7" LCD and are in the process of narrowing down the hardware (This will use an ARM processor). The idea is to read these values off of the CAN Bus and update the UI with those values. This needs to have a fairly quick boot time, 5-10 seconds would be acceptable from the time the ignigtion is turned on to the time the UI is running. I have been doing a lot of research on which linux distribution to use, but I wanted to ask the question here to get the community's suggestions. I have been a .NET programmer for years, so linux is a new world to me. Here is what I have found so far...

Tizen is geared for In-Vehicle Infotainment (IVI) (plus some others). However, this project is not an IVI, and I do not need the phone dialer, navigation, etc.

Meego is dead, and Tizen seems to be the replacement

Angstrom, Debian... would either of these be useful? I am not tied to a particular programming language or IDE. Any help and direction is appreciated!