Linux options with ethernet on Neek kit

Hi,
I would like to use my Neek kit as a modbus master to read some data over RS232 and then send it out via the ethernet port to a website for logging. The application makes use of the http://libmodbus.org/ modbus library to get the data and then sent useing https://github.com/xively/libxively.

My question is it is sensible to even try using the neek and if so what quatus version, nios2, and flavour and version of linux would you suggest. I will be doing the inital debug using Ubuntu on the desktop and then cross compile.

Any suggestions usefully recived.

Thanks