Debian ARM Kernel maintainer Vincent Sanders reports a surge of activity in the emDebian project, as well as improvements to Debian in general for embedded developers, and he invites attendees at Linux Expo UK to discuss ideas and requirements with both Debian and emDebian developers at Debian's stand in the .ORG Village.

Sanders says Debian is an ideal development platform for embedded, both as a host platform to develop applications on and, especially for larger embedded devices, as a target device operating system. Debian's support for many packages, high quality packaging tools, and eleven supported processor architectures means an application can be developed quickly on an x86 system then simply moved to a different platform such as ARM or MIPs.

The emDebian project was launched in Aug., 2001, spearheaded by Nova Scotian embedded Linux specialist AMIRIX, which at that time determined Debian to be the most suitable freely downloadable distribution for embedded development.

“For smaller embedded devices, it was thought that an approach where a 'minimal' system can be created, placed in a filesystem image, and booted might be better,” says Sanders. “From this idea,” he adds, “emDebian was created.”

Sanders lists emDebian's aims as:

1. to improve Debian as a whole for embedded use
2. to provide a set of tools to generate embedded device images simply and quickly

Sanders admits progress on the second project aim has not as rapid as he had hoped. “The emDebian project has generally not had enough contributors. However,” he adds, “More recently, work has started to move again.”

Meanwhile, Debian itself has become much stronger for use in embedded devices, especialy on ARM targets, according to Sanders. The availabilty of well tested and reliable development tools, and the availability of several new cross compilers makes development of embedded systems on Debian more popular than ever.

LinuxDevices.com's annual Embedded Linux Market Survey showed Debian to be the third most popular source/vendor of Linux for embedded development after Red Hat and uClinux, with a rising rate of adoption.

Preferred Linux source/vendor
Source: LinuxDevices.com

 
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