Debian/ARM runs on LART

November 23rd, 2000

The Information and Communication Theory Group of the Delft University of Technology is pleased to announce that Debian GNU/Linux 2.2 runs on their LART embedded system.

Eric Mouw wrote us: "After we modified the ArmLinux IDE driver for the LART, we were able to put a Linux distribution on the disk. However, there aren't that many distributions that support ArmLinux. I am a long-term Debian user (since Debian-1.0), so I'm familiar with the high quality of the Debian distribution (both i386 and sparc) and therefore I choosed debian-arm."

The debian-arm distribution didn't install without errors, but because Eric is familiar with the installation procedure, he was able to install debian-arm on the LART using their specially modified 2.2.14 kernel and the debian-arm rescue disk. The LART machine is able to compile its own kernel and modules using the Debian supplied compiler, so the stability of the complete platform has been proven.

The LART is a small yet powerful embedded computer capable of running Linux, built around an Intel SA-1100 StrongARM processor. Its performance is around 250 MIPS while consuming less than 1 Watt of power. In a standard configuration it holds 32MB DRAM and 4MB Flash ROM, which is sufficient for a Linux kernel and a sizeable ramdisk image.

The hardware design files needed to build a LART are freely available under an Open Hardware-ish license. All files can be found at http://www.lart.tudelft.nl/.