[Gpephone-devel] Buildroot for G(PE)^2

[alex zhang]

Dear Nils,

Oh, glad to see your feedback, and very happy to discuss with you. :)

On Fri, 2007-06-15 at 14:51 +0200, Nils Faerber wrote:

> We can/will/already(?) have SDKs which should be sufficient to do
> application development.

Good, when the SDKs are available? If soon, I will wait for your SDKs.

> The general idea is good but build systems like buildroot can not handle
> complex systems like G(PE)² very well. Buildroot is more designed for
> embedded system without GUI etc. You will pretty soon run into trouble
> cross compiling all we we need with buildroot.
> 
> But: What we already have done is to integrate all that complex
> information into OpenEmbedded (OE):
> 	http://www.openembedded.org
> 
Well, I will study OE to find what OE can do but OpenWrt Buildroot
cannot.

> OE wil enable you to:
> - build a complete distribution for a specific device
> - build "just" an SDK either for standalone use or within other
> development tools like Scratchbox
> - (re-)build single packages
> 
> Using OE we have already successfully (re-)built G(PE)² for various
> scenarios.
> 
> But admittedly installing OE is quite painful :(
> Using the tutorial on the OE webpage (Getting Started) describes the
> main steps and we should setup some repository to share configuration
> files - the most important file you need in OE is a local.conf ;)
> 
The OpenWrt Buildroot can do the same things:
1) it supports multi-target like ARM, X86, MIPS and others. You also can
build a complete distribution for specific device too. It will even
build the cross-compiler from source codes for you.
2) You can build single packages as well.
3) And it's very easy to use for developers.
Question: What kind of troubles do you think using buildroot for
embedded system with GUI? Any examples?

> > PS. Which phones in the market you have GPE ported to? I am going to
> > plan porting G(PE)^2 to my Motorola A1200. :)
> 
> Uh, that would be cool!
> We tried with the A1200 a little but had sever problems getting anything
> non-Motorola running :( It starts with the problem that the released
> kernel source is kind of broken and end with the hardware being quite
> special - even the framebuffer seems to be a problem. So we gave up...

Oh!! :( this is really big bad news, I am planning to buy an A1200 .But
I see someone has ported Qtopia to A1200, I know A1200 is using
QT/Embedded, but it's really surprised GTK/X cannot run on it.

And any other recommended products for G(PE)^2? Philips 968 (I saw you
said you've running X on it in last topic?)

Anyway, I think a buildroot or SDK is very important for an embedded
system solution. And is very helpful for project distribution and
spread. So, hope G(PE)^2 can have a good build environment soon.

Regards,
Alex Zhang