Why Debian on embedded device?

Debian GNU/Linux on embedded devices. Why not? In most cases you want to have a small kernel and a small root filesystem on your embeded device, because the embeded device does not have a lot of Memory, CPU power or Storage(flash).  OpenWRT provides a perfect solution for Linux on embeded devices and nowadays OpenWRT provides support for a lot of embeded hardware – in most cases Wireless Routers. It all started with the Linksys WRT54g didn’t it?

So why Debian on your Wireless Router? OpenWRT and Debian serve a different purpose. Debian is perfect for server/desktop systems and OpenWRT is suited for small sized Wireless Routers. But the simple answer is: because we can run Debian on an embedded device. And it’s very nice to have a full Linux distribution running on your router. But for this we need a little more storage then normally available.

I own an Asus WL-500G DeLuxe Wireless router with 2 * USB 2.0 ports.  When a router has USB support  it is possible to use an USB Stick or even an USB Disk as root file system instead of the internal 4 MB Flash. The router has 32 MB of memory and an CPU of 200MHz. The router has 4 LAN 100 mbit/s ethernet ports, 1 WAN 100 mbit/s ethernet port and integrated Broadcom BCM4306 802.11b/g Wireless LAN controler. One of the very neat features is the configurable switch – so the 5 available ethernet ports can be configured in anly VLAN configuration besides the default configuration. See http://wiki.openwrt.org/OpenWrtDocs/Hardware/Asus/WL500GD for more information.