An annual conference of Debian developers has published dozens of videos from this year's event, held last week in Helsinki, Finland. Several DebConf2005 videos might interest embedded developers, including one from emDebian's project leader, Wookey.

Wookey (pictured at right) begins his presentation on emDebian by suggesting that embedded developers today might prefer to use the Scratchbox or OpenEmbedded cross development tools, since they currently work very well. He then discusses the state of emDebian, and its current focus an goals.

The emDebian project launched in May of 2000, and included a cross-development toolchain as well as tools aimed at extending the Linux kernel configuration system to include root filesystem configuration for embedded systems. EmDebian's filesystem creation tool was positioned as a free alternative to the proprietary tools offered by commercial providers such as MontaVista. It lost momentum, however, in part because it was based on CML2, a configuration language later abandoned by the Linux kernel, Wookey says.

Currently, Wookey says, the emDebian project is focused on facilitating cross-development by making sure that compilers for all 11 architectures supported in Debian are built from the same source. Additionally, the project is working to improve support for AMD64 and PowerPC development hosts, which Wookey says are becoming more common.

DebConf2005 videos that might interest embedded Linux developers include:

• Embedded Debian Demo (125MB MPEG) by Wookey. Slides (PDF)
• Custom Debian Distributions (122MB MPEG) by Andreas Tille. Slides (HTML)
• Multiarch (93MB MPEG) by Tollef Fog Heen
• Cross-Compiling Debian from Scratch (67MB MPEG) by Timo Savola. Slides (PDF)

A complete list of videos can be found here. More about DebConf2005 can be found here.

Debian is the most commonly embedded form of Linux, according to LinuxDevices.com's annual reader survey for 2005, used in about 14 percent of all embedded projects and products.

 
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