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 has tried to strip Debian down to be a much smaller system whilst keeping all the good things.
Status of Emdebian distributions
As of July 2014, updates to the Emdebian distributions ceased. There will be no further updates and no further stable releases.
What changed?
The availability of devices without expandable storage became too small to sustain the amount of work required to prepare the distribution. Any device capable of using an SD card has more than enough storage to run a standard Debian distribution.
What about low resource machines?
Emdebian is based on Debian and therefore uses Debian packages. Some Emdebian installations did make lower demands on the machine hardware but this was be because the Emdebian installation selected packages already in Debian that were intended for such purposes. Those packages have mostly been removed due to lack of activity upstream and a lack of suitable devices.
An old PC with a reasonably large hard drive (or a capacity to use a modern multi-gigabyte hard drive or other media) was not likely to benefit from Emdebian.
What does Emdebian provide?
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Prebuilt toolchains to build for arm, armel, ia64, m68k, mips, mipsel, powerpc, s390 and sparc using a variety of gcc-3.3, gcc-3.4, gcc-4.0, gcc-4.1, gcc-4.2, gcc-4.3 and gcc-4.4 compilers. See the search page for more information.
Smaller packages - LWN have a review which covers some of the background on Emdebian distributions.
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Emdebian Grip - binary-compatible with Debian
Complete repositories of packages for various architectures, based on coreutils and perl. Support for standard Debian tools like debian-installer. No functional changes compared to Debian. Support is available for i386, amd64, powerpc, armel, armhf, mips and mipsel. Unofficial Debian ports for powerpcspe and sh4 are available for unstable.
Emdebian Grip 1.0 (based on Debian 5.0 "Lenny") is already in widespread usage as well as Emdebian Grip 2.0 (based on Debian 6.0 "Squeeze"). Binary compatibility means that each suite of Emdebian Grip is as close to the stability of the equivalent Debian suite as possible.
Emdebian Grip stopped receiving updates at Emdebian Grip 3.1 (based on Debian GNU/Linux Wheezy 7.1).
Emdebian Grip can support building packages and can be installed as a simple migration from Debian in the normal ways, although as Debian continues to update beyond Wheezy, this is likely to become harder. A recommended way to install Emdebian Grip 1.0 is to use the Debian Lenny or Squeeze installer to install a Debian base system and use pre-seeding to migrate to Grip during the installation process. Subsequent versions also work with the Debian Installer or with multistrap.
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Emdebian Crush - cross-built, customised Emdebian installations without perl
Only available for ARM, based on Debian 5.0 Lenny.
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.
Certain packages were heavily modified and cross-built - functional changes therefore exist between Emdebian Crush and standard Debian.
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.
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 multistrap package.
All development on Crush has ceased, there will be no further releases or updates of Crush.
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Debian packages continually updated for cross-building using the Emdebian toolchains.
Root filesystem generation is based on multistrap package.
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Preconfigured root filesystems for devices which do not need to be upgraded.
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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
[13 Jul 2013] Emdebian Grip halted
[15 Jun 2013] Emdebian Wheezy-Grip updated to 3.1
[04 May 2013] Emdebian Grip 3.0 (based on Debian 7.0 "wheezy") released
[24 Feb 2013] Emdebian Grip Squeeze updated to 6.0.7
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.