On Monday 16 February 2009 12:38, Kumar Appaiah wrote:
On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 11:40:35AM +0530, jtd wrote:
You can do that too. But the real fun is being able to write code for lots of customised hardware. Without the pain of creating toolchains. Many arm gadgets have displays, keyboards etc (cellphones, pdas and some "instanton" notebooks). But the vast majority have none of these and are used in machine control, robotics etc.
I think I understand. If you don't mind letting me know,
Heck why would i "mind" letting you know. I am happy to talk all day about something technical.
do you intend installing the Armel distribution in a virtual machine to build software, or do you have hardware on which you can install it?
You install on a standard x86 or x86-64 machine , in a chroot. But you can use qemu to run the binary. Ofcourse if you have a arm machine (A780, NEO, etc) you could install on them. However compiling on them would not be practical due to memory, disk space and processor speed limitations.
How do you get over the need to cross compile by using the armel architecture distribution?
The $CROSS-COMPILE env variable is set. so gcc $CROSS-COMPILE - usually set in your makefile - will crosscompile for you specific arm variant. Also gdb for arm is installed, so you can debug with gdb and openocd over jtag.
Once you have done the above you can create debs of your package, do an install on a microsd, usb pendrive or nfs disk and boot. Then dpkg -i yourprog.