Have you ever wanted to do something cool with one of your electronic devices, but been stopped from doing it because the vendor did not think of that use-case? Have you ever found a problem with the code on one of your devices but being unable to fix it because the vendor no longer cared about the software or did not allow modifications?

Have you ever had to throw out perfectly good hardware since the software was no longer updated/working?

I have :) And it makes me annoyed every time!

Instead of being in the hands of the vendor of your NAS, router, media-center etc. how about actually controlling it yourself?

In this talk I will present a framework (OE-lite) to build custom embedded Linux from scratch. I will talk about why it is simply not good enough to “just install Ubuntu on the damn thing!” and walk through my own use-case of building a router from a BananaPI-R1 board.

OE-lite is a mature framework for creating robust, maintainable custom Linux platforms. Originally forked from OpenEmbedded to showcase how to improve on major technical defects, today OE-lite is a serious alternative to frameworks like Yocto, buildroot or OpenWRT. With a strong focus on avoiding surprises when developing custom Linux systems, working with very different hardware platforms from the same codebase and maintaining the systems for 10 - 15 years OE-lite offers another perspective on embedded Linux systems. The project have not been very public, but we have been working hard to change that and we are now inviting embedded Linux developers to come join us!

Link: oe-lite.org

Kim Højgaard-Hansen

Kim Højgaard-Hansen has worked with building Linux from source since 2004 through various Linux Distributions. Since 2013 he has been working for Prevas A/S developing custom embedded Linux platforms for anything from multimedia to medical devices on many different hardware architectures and with lots of custom hardware and software integrations. Kim has a background in academia doing a PhD in wireless communication performance optimizations.