Building and setup Ångström distribution from scratch
Host platform: Ubuntu Desktop 10.10
Target platform: Olimex CS-E9302 Development board
Ångström was started by a small group of people who worked on the OpenEmbedded, OpenZaurus and OpenSimpad projects to unify their effort to make a stable and userfriendly distribution for embedded devices like handhelds, set top boxes and network-attached storage devices and more. All Ångström binaries are built using OpenEmbedded.
OpenEmbedded offers a best-in-class cross-compile environment. It allows developers to create a complete Linux Distribution for embedded systems. Some of the OpenEmbedded advantages include:
- support for many hardware architectures
- multiple releases for those architectures
- tools for speeding up the process of recreating the base after changes have been made
- easy to customize
- runs on any Linux distribution
- cross-compiles 1000's of packages including GTK+, Qt, the X Windows system, Mono, Java, and about anything else you might ever need
Bitbake handles the parsing and execution of the data files. The data itself is of various types; recipes which give details about particular pieces of software, class data which is an abstraction of common build information (e.g. how to build a Linux kernel) and configuration data for machines, policy decisions, etc., which acts as a glue and binds everything together. Bitbake knows how to combine multiple data sources together, each data source being referred to as a layer. Bitbake is responsible for parsing the metadata, generating a list of tasks from it and then executing them. The most common usage is bitbake packagename where packagename is the name of the package you wish to build (from now on called the target). This often equates to the first part of a .bb filename, so to run the simple-package_1.2.3.bb file, you might type bitbake simple-package. Several different versions of simple-package might exist and bitbake will choose the one selected by the distribution configuration. Bitbake will also try to execute any dependent tasks first so before building simple-package it would build a cross compiler and glibc if not already built.
The Metadata (recipes) are .bb files that are usually referred to as 'recipes'. In general, a recipe contains information about a single piece of software such as where to download the source, any patches that are needed, any special configuration options, how to compile the source files and how to package the compiled output.
Class (.bbclass) files contain information which is useful to share between metadata files. An example is the autotools class which contains the common settings that any application using autotools would use.
The configuration (.conf) files define various configuration variables which govern what Poky does. These are split into several areas, such as machine configuration options, distribution configuration options, compiler tuning options, general common configuration and user configuration (local.conf).