Table of Contents
Embedded Debian is an official sub-project of Debian aimed at 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.
It is also an open development environment to cover the multitude of possible ways of building small GNU/Linux systems. Different methodologies are appropriate depending on the resources and functionality of the target system and the development environment. Embedded Debian exists to encourage work on all possible methods that build from Debian's coherent source tree or use its multi-architecture build tools. The common thread is free software and open development. The various development threads are organised as sub-projects.
There are a multitude of efforts currently underway to bring Linux to the embedded systems space. These are being worked on by small non-commercial development communities up to large commercial organizations. Because of the open source nature of Linux and the distributions built on Linux, there is quite a bit of cross-pollination between these groups. However, there doesn't seem to be any one open place providing a focus for these efforts.
This leads to a situation in which there are several distribution that are good, but not as good as they could be, because they suffer from one or more of the following:
The solution is to concentrate all that is good in the embedded Linux world. Linux and Debian GNU/Linux have gained momentum partly because of the critical masses they have achieved. We believe that embedded Linux can gain far more momentum than it already has if a critical mass of development activity, focused in the right place, can be achieved.
We believe Debian is that place, and that a concentrated effort has the potential to advance the state of the art of embedded Linux faster and more effectively then do the fragmentized efforts that exist today.
Whereas other Linux distributions are developed by individuals, small, closed groups, or commercial vendors, Debian is the only Linux distribution that is being developed cooperatively by many individuals through the Internet, in the same spirit as Linux and other free software.
Although Debian GNU/Linux itself is free software, it is a base upon which value-added Linux distributions can be built. By providing a reliable, full-featured base system, Debian provides Linux users with increased compatibility, and allows Linux distribution creators to eliminate duplication of effort and focus on the things that make their distribution special.
We believe that Embedded Debian can provide a vendor neutral reference distribution for the benefit of individual developers, organizations who want to use embedded Linux on their own, and organizations who want to create their own embedded Linux distributions on a common reference.
Embedded Debian would not merely be a different flavour of Debian, but one of the many flavours of Debian. It would provide a common infrastructure that minimizes the "feature friction" between the vendor distributions based on it. It would be a more vibrant/dynamic base distribution than any other embedded Linux.
In contrast to OpenEmbedded which aims to provide tools to make distributions like Familiar run on embedded devices using an incompatible derivative package format, Emdebian aims to provide tools to make Debian run on embedded devices using the normal Debian package format. The Familiar distribution contains either Opie or GPE and is specifically for certain embedded devices - Emdebian is working towards GPE inclusion in Debian to allow scaling to any device, from the smallest embedded device to a full desktop on low resource hardware.
This paper details the updates within Emdebian since DebConf6.