Posted by Cliff Brake on 2011-03-29 | 
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This is part of an ongoing series of articles on the Git version control system. The “many repository” paradigm has been partly driven by the distributed development paradigm. Git solves the problem of multiple developers working in multiple repositories very well. Because we want to use and customize projects like the Linux kernel, U-boot, and [...]
Posted by Cliff Brake on 2011-03-17 | Read the First Comment
This is part of an ongoing series of articles on the Git version control system. This article discusses the trend in software configuration management toward multiple repositories, rather than one large repository. In the past when many companies used Subversion or comparable systems, there was typically one huge company repository (I’ve seen them in the [...]
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This screencast (use Firefox to view the screencast) provides an overview of the Git version control system. There are 3 features of Git that are especially interesting: many repositories (vs. one large repository) distributed development cheap branches The fundamental driver for better tools is increasing system complexity. More and more we are required to manage [...]
Posted by Cliff Brake on 2010-10-11 | 4 Comments to Read
Recently an OpenEmbedded class name srctree became usable. The srctree.bbclass enables operation inside of an existing source tree for a project, rather than using the fetch/unpack/patch idiom. The srctree.bbclass in combination with the OpenEmbedded gitver.bbclass and git submodules provides a very interesting way to build custom software with OpenEmbedded. One of the classic problems with [...]
Posted by Cliff Brake on 2010-06-14 | Be the First to Comment
This article and screen-cast is a continuation of that last couple posts describing the BEC OE build template. The purpose again for a build system is to automate tedious manual tasks, and in doing so, we end up documenting how the build system works. Having a good build system is important during product development so [...]
Posted by Cliff Brake on 2010-06-05 | 3 Comments to Read
Setting up an OpenEmbedded build is a fairly simple process if you carefully follow the instructions. There are also a number of scripts available that automate the setup such as the OpenEmbedded Tools for Eclipse, the Angstrom setup scripts, the KaeilOS Openembedded Manager, and I’m sure there are many more (feel free to add in [...]
Posted by Cliff Brake on 2009-11-05 | 2 Comments to Read
I do quite a few OpenEmbedded project builds during the course of a week. This process usually takes 3-5 minutes. That is just enough time to get distracted doing something else and forget about the build until an hour later when you realize — oops, I was supposed to send out a release email once [...]
Posted by Cliff Brake on 2009-09-08 | 6 Comments to Read
I recently wrote an article about best practices building Qt applications with OpenEmbedded, and it occured to me that I should write an equivalent article for Gtk+ applications. The same points apply — put your application source in a SCM system, and put the install logic in the application source (read the above article). The [...]
Posted by Cliff Brake on 2009-08-06 | 14 Comments to Read
This article describes how to cross compile a Qt application (named qt_tutorial) with OpenEmbedded, and several best practices you should consider. OpenEmbedded currently includes fairly good support for building Qt — both Qt Embedded and Qt X11. OE also includes a number of qt classes that make building Qt applications easy. One of the main [...]
Posted by Cliff Brake on 2009-07-14 | 4 Comments to Read
One task that is a often confusing to new OpenEmbedded users is how to capture changes to the source code for a package/recipe. First, lets review the progression in tools use to capture source code changes. In days of yore, developers often used gnu diff to capture modifications to a source tree. The typical practice [...]
Posted by Cliff Brake on 2009-01-09 | Be the First to Comment
This article presents a very nice overview of options to disable ssh host key checking. When working with embedded systems where you are constantly reloading the rootfs, it is really annoying to have to edit your ~/.ssh/known_hosts every time you update the rootfs on the target device. The solution is to simply disable host key [...]
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From http://www.embedded.com/design/opensource/204300381 : Host platform Although everything I will describe can be also done on a Windows host, I recommend using Linux. It’s more convenient, and more tools and utilities are available. And if you rely on a few Windows applications such as Word and Outlook, you can still run them on Linux in emulation [...]
Posted by Cliff Brake on | 2 Comments to Read
In this day and age, most embedded systems include a way for users to easily update software once the device has been deployed. This article discusses the requirements for a field update mechanism along with pointers for how to implement. Update Mechanism Requirements Requirements for a field update mechanism might be: easy for users to [...]
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Recently, I had a customer who needed an embedded Linux distribution running on an Advantech PCM-9371 single board computer (SBC). The PCM-9371 contains a low voltage Celeron or Pentium III processor. This article describes why the Openembedded build system was chosen and a few tips for running Openembedded on a x86 system. The hard way! [...]
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At some point, most Linux developers need to master Autotools. For most of us, this is a fairly painful process, but like any good tool, Autotools is extremely useful and well worth learning. For example, if your program is set up correctly using Autotools, it will cross compile with almost zero effort in OpenEmbedded, or [...]