Gumstix and OpenEmbedded

Even before I bought my Gumstix I have been playing around with the build environment. Originally I started with Ubuntu 8.04 in VMWare virtual machine on a Windows Vista host. Running on this VM I had the emulator QEMU (http://www.nongnu.org/qemu/about.html) running the X11 image for the Verdex Pro. Having an emulated system running inside a VM was terribly slow but this was more of a proof of concept test before I went ahead and ordered a Gumstix.

I have since moved away from VM's to a dedicated development machine connected to my home network. It's an old single core Athlon 64 3000 something + but compilation speed is faster than in my dual core VM's. Having a dedicated machine means I don't have to worry about opening a virtual machine everytime I want to do something, or worry about synchronising virtual machines between my laptop and desktop. As long as I have internet access and an SSH client, I can log into my development machine from anywhere in the world.

I'm currently running my build environment on Ubuntu 9.04. Previously I had issues with bitbake referencing a different vesion of Python than that installed with the OS, but this has been fixed recently. I've used a combination of the instructions listed in these pages to setup OE:

http://www.gumstix.net/Software/view/Software-Overo/Setting-up-a-build-environment/111.html

http://www.pixhawk.ethz.ch/wiki/tutorials/omap/openembedded_bitbake_installation

The Pixhawk page in particular has a nice tutorial on setting up OE, just copy and paste the commands on the page and you're pretty much set.

So far I've tried bitbaking omap3-console-image and omap3-desktop-image, which worked fine. I have also tried bitbake world but I haven't had a lot of luck getting it to finish. It seems there are quite a number of issues with some of the recipes, anything from simple typos to dependencies on renamed or abandoned recipes. I don't actually need all of the packages so I haven't been bothered to explore it further.

So far so good with the Gumstix. Next step will be to recompile the Mightex camera drivers for the Gumstix architecture and test their performance.