Bulding OpenEmbedded for BeagleBoard

My experience getting OE built for a BeagleBoard….

A Fresh Start

Wanting to start with a fresh host, I did a network install of CentOS 5.3 from our internal CentOS mirror (this will turn out to bite me later) onto a new hard drive.

With the fresh CentOS install I started looking at putting together the OpenEmbedded build environment (see BeagleBoard#OpenEmbedded and OpenEmbedded Getting_Started.) The Getting_Started page provides the basis for my process.

Just to make things interesting I decide to place the root for the build inside a fresh user account so my first step is:

$ mkdir -p ~/oe/stuff/build/conf

(this will also cause a little confusion later.)

Installing BitBake

Even after configuring proxy settings in ~/.subversion/servers, I can’t get svn to checkout bitbake.  The workaround is to download bitbake-1.8.12.tar.gz and extracting the tarball to ~/oe/stuff/bitbake.

Getting GIT

I try following the steps at Bulding Git on CentOS 5.  The first difference is using yum vs apt-get, so installing dependencies is:

sudo yum install gettext-devel expat-devel curl-devel zlib-devel openssl-devel

instead of:

sudo apt-get install gettext-devel expat-devel curl-devel zlib-devel openssl-devel

Of course, I am still connected to the corporate internal network so when I get to this command:

wget http://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/git-1.6.2.tar.gz

the process just hangs–another proxy issue.  Time to call IT and get a DMZ port…  Ok, now I am back connected to a DMZ port, no more fiddling with proxy issues from tool to tool.  The GIT install goes off without a hitch once connected to a DMZ port.  Moving on now the GIT is got …

Obtaining OpenEmbedded using GIT

Since we are now on a DMZ port, the git clone process goes off without a hitch.  Moving on to the local configuration, lack of attention to detail cost me a half hour (due to my use of the ~/oe/stuff root.)

Local Configuration and ‘bitbake console-image’

We make some small changes here to the local.conf file, /home/cmma/oe/stuff/build/conf/local.conf:

BBFILES = "/home/cmma/oe/stuff/openembedded/recipes/*/*.bb"
DISTRO = "angstrom-2008.1"
MACHINE = "beagleboard"

Note the machine is set to ‘beagleboard’.

When adding BBPATH to my .bashrc file I updated the /stuff/build path element, but failed to update the /stuff/openembedded path element.  This caused bitbake to fail and I spent  some time researching the error messages.  When I reviewed the .bashrc I caught my mistake.

I found I was still missing some dependencies and ran:

sudo yum install gcc-c++ diffstat texi2html python-devel

This is where my choice of a local miror started to get me in trouble–it didn’t have other dependencies that bitbake needed.  So there was a manual install of the following:

pysqlite
help2man

Once the required dependencies were in place, I installed the recommend psyco:

$ cd ~/src
$ svn co http://codespeak.net/svn/psyco/dist/ psyco-dist

following the instructions found here (I had previously configured all sources to be downloaded to ~/src so that’s where psyco went as well.)

After that my bitbake command:

$ bitbake console-image

started without and complaints and 4 hours later it completed.

Updates

Two days later I’ve just issued my first ‘git pull’ () and the ‘bitbake console-image’ is currently about 10% complete.  I don’t expect any issues from here on.

This was all done in preparation for a custom beagleboard solution I am working on which will require some OMAP pinmux changes.  Confirming we can build an image was the first step in this process.