The invention provides a line card management method based on distributed system OLT (Optical Line Terminal) equipment. The method comprises the following steps: inquiring hardware registers of all line cards, acquiring current in-place states of the line cards and storing the acquired current in-place states of the line cards by a main control card; judging whether the in-place states of the line cards change or not; if the in-place states of the line cards change from non-in-place states to the in-place states, configuring and activating the line cards by the main control card; meanwhile, starting up a timer by the main control card; periodically sending heartbeat messages to the line cards by the main control card; detecting whether the line cards receive the heartbeat messages or not; if the line cards do not receive the heartbeat messages, adding a heartbeat failure variable with 1; and if the heartbeat failure variable is greater than a set threshold, restarting the line cards, executing a main control card configuration step, and activating the line cards. Through adoption of the method, real-time states of all the line cards in current system equipment can be recorded, and hot plug of the line cards is supported. If the line cards are hung up, the line cards can be restarted automatically, so that the manual maintenance cost is lowered.