User Interface

A major point of criticism of embedded Linux systems is their lack of a simple user interface - generally embedded systems have an archaic touch to their user interface. But a tendency that is evolving is to split the user interface into three distinct sections

• The actual user-interface allowing to control the systems dedicated application providing a system overview along side that gives you a general 'system up and running' or 'call the technician' information.
• A in depth interface that allows you to configure/update and diagnose system operations at an expert level from the application specifics all the way down to OS's internals.
• The log facility that allows long term tendency analyzing as well as backtracking of events in case of a fatal error (i.e. when the embedded system was not able to respond appropriately)

This split is not always done cleanly and is not always visible to the user, it will often run on one interface, but this split is anticipated by most interfaces of embedded devices - representing the actual operational demands. Simple to use for common operations - clear and instructive to the maintenance personnel in case of errors and long term data that can be processed independently of the current status of the specific device. Embedded Linux can provide all three in a very high quality if designed to these goals from the very beginning on. Many embedded Linux distributions offer a web-server giving OS-independent remote access to status information - at the same time maintenance via secure shell can allow insight into the system down to directly poking around in the kernel at runtime without disturbing the systems operation and simple inter-operability with other networked OS's allows off-site logging and tendency analysis.