emdebian.org - home of the Embedded Debian Project

Welcome to Emdebian.org. The Embedded Debian Project is making Debian GNU/Linux a mainstream choice for embedded projects.

Debian's multiarchitecture support, vendor independence, social contract and huge software base make it an attractive choice for all sorts of systems, but the main distribution is very much aimed at systems with at least desktop resources (big hard discs, plenty of memory). Embedded Debian tries to strip Debian down to be a much smaller system whilst keeping all the good things.

Getting started with Emdebian

Why use Emdebian rather than Debian?

The most obvious reason is installation sizes. Debian simply cannot fit onto some devices that could run GNU/Linux. Other machines can accommodate a typical Debian installation but would have little available space for user data etc. and adding more storage is impossible or impractical. See more on the available flavours of Emdebian. Generally, if the machine can be easily extended with an extra internal hard drive or by replacing the existing hard drive with a larger one, there is no particular reason to look at Emdebian for that machine. Embedded devices typically have no such way of adding more storage, at least not internally.

What about low resource machines?

Emdebian is based on Debian and therefore uses Debian packages. Some Emdebian installations can make lower demands on the machine hardware but this would be because the Emdebian installation is based on packages already in Debian that are intended for such purposes. Using the same packages with a Debian installation is likely to be little different to the same packages with an Emdebian installation. Therefore, an old PC with a reasonably large hard drive (or a capacity to use a modern multi-gigabyte hard drive) is not likely to benefit from Emdebian. However, a low resource embedded device without the capacity for adding more internal storage would benefit greatly from an Emdebian installation. If there are other packages that would suit low resource machines, Emdebian developers are often willing to assist in getting the packages into Debian and thereby, Emdebian.

See the documentation for more information.

What does Emdebian provide?

Toolchains

Prebuilt toolchains to build for arm, ia64, m68k, mips, mipsel, powerpc and sparc using gcc-3.3, gcc-3.4, gcc-4.0, gcc-4.1 and gcc-4.2. Packages are also available for gcc-4.1 and gcc-4.2 to build arm on powerpc.

Smaller packages

Emdebian Crush - the smallest Emdebian installations

Busybox based root filesystem and packages to support the G Palmtop Environment based on GTK+2 or any workable package selection in-between. Kernels and kernel modules are not provided directly but support exists to add custom kernels to the installation tarballs. Packages are heavily modified and cross-built - functional changes exist between Emdebian Crush and standard Debian. Emdebian Crush 1.0 (based on Debian 5.0 "Lenny") will only be available for ARM - adding more architectures in non-trivial. Subsequent releases will migrate to armel instead of ARM and include i386, mips and mipsel. Powerpc support can be considered, if there is sufficient interest.

Emdebian Crush does not support building packages on Crush itself, all work to develop packages for Crush must be done on a normal Debian machine. There is no migration path from Debian to Emdebian Crush. In particular, emdebian-tools cannot work on a machine already running Crush (or packages from Crush) because Crush does not include perl or perl scripts.

Installations of Emdebian Crush require significant user involvement, images will not generally be available for direct download. Instead, each installation is customised from the available package set using the scripts in the emdebian-rootfs package and possibly a few custom packages cross-built using scripts in the emdebian-tools package.

Support is currently only available for ARM. Adding extra architectures is not trivial.

Root filesystem for ARM - based on busybox and removing "Essential" Debian packages like perl.

Emdebian Grip - an intermediate installation

Complete repositories of packages for various architectures, based on coreutils and perl. Support for standard Debian tools like debootstrap and debian-installer. Few (if any) functional changes compared to Debian. Support is expected for i386, amd64, powerpc, arm, armel, mips and mipsel.

Installations of Emdebian Grip will work with standard Debian tools like debootstrap, debian-installer and maybe debian-live - as long as the device has enough space to generate such systems.

Emdebian Grip can support building packages (although this is currently untested) and can be installed as a simple migration from Debian in the normal ways. Indeed, the recommended way to install Emdebian Grip is to use the Debian Lenny installer to install a Lenny base system and use pre-seeding to migrate to Grip during the installation process.

The delays to Debian Lenny mean that Emdebian will be able to release Emdebian Grip 1.0 alongside Lenny.

Cross building tools

Debian packages continually updated for cross-building using the Emdebian toolchains. Include support for installing toolchains, patching Debian source packages, cross building binary packages and generating the root filesystem from a repository of binary packages.

Embedded Debian is currently very much a work-in-progress: plenty of people are already using Debian in their devices and systems, but there is huge potential to make doing this easier. We already have tools, toolchains and a root filesystem, but more work is needed to have full distributions ready to build or download. Anyone with an interest in this area is very welcome to help.

News

[07 Mar 2009] Emdebian at TCL 2009, Cambridge.
[14 Feb 2009] Emdebian Crush 1.0 (lenny) released
[14 Feb 2009] Emdebian Grip 1.0 (lenny) released
[11 Feb 2009] Emdebian at Fosdem 2009, Brussels.
[28 Oct 2008] Emdebian at LinuxLive! 2008, London.
[08 Sep 2008] Emdebian at Extremadura, Spain. Sept '08

For older news items see the News Page. The best way to keep up-to-date is to subscribe to the debian-embedded mailing list.

See the emdebian contact page for information on contacting us.

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