Familiar Build Setup

[Introduction]

The Familiar project provides a simple configuration tool to ease the setup of its OpenEmbedded derived build system for developers and skilled end users. This document describes how to use it.

[Prerequisites]

Before you can begin with the setup please make sure to

install Git

get a copy of the Familiar build tree:

	git clone http://familiar.handhelds.org/git/familiar-build.git

install Zenity (usually included in a standard Gnome installation)

[Setup Procedure]

WARNING: Don't run any of the commands below as root! Some of the scripts that run during a build may contain bugs and write to the host filesystem which is likely to break your system!

You should have cloned the git tree by now (see above). Change into the toplevel directory of the tree and run the setup utility:

    cd /path/to/familiar-build
    sh setup/build-env.sh

The script will open a few dialogs as shown below. Some present default settings that you can change if you like to. Note that although the examples below show /var/tmp/familiar-build as the top level directory, you can choose to keep the tree wherever you like. When run from the top level directory, the script will auto-detect were the tree is located.

Now you can set up the shell environment variables and run a build:

    cd /path/to/newly/created/build/directory
    source conf/env.sh
    bitbake your-package

[Troubleshooting]

I don't have X11 available/can't use zenity for other reasons. What can I do?

Joshua D. Abraham has provided a console-only setup script that will work without zenity. Simply replace

build-env.sh

with

build-env-nozenity.sh

in the commands listed above.

There are so many packages required to build an image and of them fails to build. What can I do?

Note that building images is not a prerequisite to building additional packages. In most cases you don't need to build an image, just build packages you're interested in and install them via ipkg.

qemu-native fails to build. How can I fix that and what is it good for anyway?

qemu-native is used to run ARM code on the build machine. In particular, it is required to generate binary locale packages, which cannot be generated on target machines due to limited RAM. This is only useful if you build images and intend to make use of internationalization features. Otherwise you can safely disable binary locale generation:

    cd /path/to/newly/created/build/directory
    echo 'ENABLE_BINARY_LOCALE_GENERATION = "0"' >> conf/local.conf

I'm using a current distribution on the build machine and various tools fail to compile.

Your distribution is probably using GCC 4.x which broke compatibility with older C/C++ source code. Try with an older GCC version or check the mailing list archives.

$Id: build-setup.html,v 1.3 2007/04/14 11:36:14 rw Exp $