Hello to all Anthony de Boer said: [ I ]
You can apt-get stuff onto all manner of different architectures with no problem; Debian-style packages are built for quite a range. And the philosophy there (and with most desktop/server-ish Linux distros) is that software is compiled on its native architecture, so the source code gets farmed out to a hodgepodge of different boxes to compile for ARM, MIPS, PowerPC, and whatever else they want to support.
[ II ]
Note also that though the Linux distros are coming from x86, nowadays that's getting long in the tooth and the default flavour for many a year now has been AMD64/x86-64. Improved small hardware means things like a Raspberry Pi are more than powerful enough to compile their own code natively, although desktop software is starting to assume 64-bit with huge wodges of memory and becomes problematic on 32-bit even with more RAM than most of us could afford 20 years ago.
[ III ]
You can even mix-and-match, with an upgraded target device for native compiles but a cross-compiler for developers who need a quick edit-recompile-test loop on one binary, or need to be able to do that on a laptop in the field. Another "gotcha" is that some software wasn't written to cross-compile and has build scripting that _will_ assume the build environment is the target, so if you have any pieces like that then a native compile is the easier route.
Thanks for the synopsis of this stuff... Regarding this, we / I haven't really decided long term if the SBC who have made and provisioned should be almost metal without an op system, or have ftp and telnet, and "everything" so they cna be fixed remotely. so for the first few hundred ( made this week ) we split the difference like you said in [ III ] above. Even trusting libraries on the target versus -static is pretty much undetermined. So if we / I read "X-compiles leave more open ended future proofing if you where scuba flippers while compiling". Id put on a pair "just to be safe". Some famous sounding BOOST writeup guy said subsets of prepared work are uncool a little so I have really tried to do as told. Im using BOOST just a little but all over. Maybe the next sweetening will use ASIO the sockets kit. Im trying ot stay ahead of user requirements, and as the first version is in use, prepare work as a contingency. I don't like the hand made sockets stuff I made, but it does seem to work. X-comp with compatibly for C 11 is not trivial. Regards to all, Dan