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BitBaking OSSIE For The Beagleboard

Getting Started With OpenEmbedded

Note: If you have already set up OpenEmbedded and would just like to BitBake OSSIE you may skip to the Building OSSIE section.

Note: This section is adopted from the OpenEmbedded Wiki:  OE Getting Started. Please read  OE and Your Distro for advice on how to configure your operating system.

Prerequisites

Before starting, make sure you have the following software before preceding (see your distributions documentation on how to install software):

1. Git
2. SVN
3. CVS
4. C++ Compiler (e.g. g++)
5. diffstat
6. texi2html
7. GNU Autotools (specifically autoconf, automake and libtool)
8. makeinfo
9. chrpath
10. qemu (may not be necessary on some systems)

Other software may be required depending on which version of BitBake you use and your Linux distribution. BitBake will normally inform you of missing packages that should be installed.

Getting The Toolchain

First, create your directory structure. I recommend creating an OE directory in your home folder:

mkdir -p $HOME/OE/build/conf
cd $HOME/OE

Now, get the lastest BitBake (1.12.0 as of this writing, to find the latest version visit  http://download.berlios.de/bitbake/), and unpack it:

wget http://download.berlios.de/bitbake/bitbake-1.12.0.tar.gz # Download the BitBake package
tar zxvf bitbake-1.12.0.tar.gz                                # Extract it
mv bitbake{-1.12.0,}                                          # Rename the directory to bitbake

Now that we have BitBake, we need to get OpenEmbedded. Before simply checking out OpenEmbedded trunk, let's look for a recently tested tag or stable ref here:  http://git.openembedded.org/cgit.cgi/openembedded/refs/. As of this writing, the newest stable ref is "2011.03-maintenance". If using a testing tag, be sure to check the commit log to ensure that a "beagleboard angstrom-2008.1" build was at least tested with a simple console-image. To get OpenEmdedded run (this may take a while depending on your connection speed):

git clone git://git.openembedded.org/openembedded
cd openembedded
# Replace "2011.03-maintenance" with the tag/branch you want
git checkout 2011.03-maintenance

Setup The Environment

Before configuring BitBake, we should set some environment variables. There are many places to do this, including on the command line at build time, but we recommend placing the necessary export commands to the end of your .bashrc file. This can be accomplished by executing the following command (paste this entire section into a terminal at once):

cat >> $HOME/.bashrc << EOF

# OpenEmbedded Environment Setup
export OEBASE=\$HOME/OE
export PATH=\$OEBASE/bitbake/bin:\$PATH
export BBPATH=\$OEBASE/build:\$OEBASE/openembedded
export BB_ENV_EXTRAWHITE="OEBASE"
EOF
. $HOME/.bashrc # Update environment

Configuring BitBake

Now that we have the toolchain, we need to set up our BitBake configuration. Copy a sample configuration and edit it to fit our needs:

cd $HOME/OE/
cp openembedded/conf/local.conf.sample build/conf/local.conf
vim build/conf/local.conf # Use your favorite text-editor

There are many possible settings in this file, the ones that are important to us are:

...
# Use this to specify where BitBake should place the downloaded sources into
DL_DIR = "${OEBASE}/sources" # This is just preference, the default is fine

# Delete the line below. Then specify which .bb files to consider for
# your build. Typically this will be something like BBFILES = "/path/to/openembedded/recipes/*/*.bb"
BBFILES := "${OEBASE}/openembedded/recipes/*/*.bb"
BBFILES += " ${OEBASE}/ossie-recipes/*/*.bb"
...
INHERIT += "rm_work" # This is not necessary, but can reduce disk usage by ~4GB
...
TMPDIR = ${OEBASE}/build/tmp
...
MACHINE = "beagleboard"
...
DISTRO = "angstrom-2010.x" # Or newest available Angstrom distro in "${OEBASE}/openembedded/conf/distro/"
...
# These lines may be necessary depending on your build system
ENABLE_BINARY_LOCALE_GENERATION = "0"
ASSUME_PROVIDED += "qemu-native"
GLIBC_GENERATE_LOCALES = "en_US.UTF-8" # Add any locales you may need
...
IMAGE_FSTYPES = " tar.bz2 "
...
# REMOVE_THIS_LINE:="${@bb.fatal('Read the comments in your conf/local.conf')}"

Other options that may be of interest are PARALLEL_MAKE and BB_NUMBER_THREADS especially for multi-threaded, multi-core and/or multi-processor build systems.

Building a Console Image

This step is not required but recommended to ensure that your setup is working properly before you try to build the OSSIE recipes. We will build task-base and console-image. For more information on what exactly is happening here, see the OpenEmbedded documentation. Together, these can take hours on a standard machine. We recommend you let it run over night. If you encounter any errors up to this point, then there is a problem with your BitBake or OpenEmbedded installation, dependencies, or configuration, and not with any OSSIE software, please refer to the OpenEmbedded help resources such as their manual, wiki, or IRC channels.

cd $OEBASE/build
bitbake task-base && bitbake console-image

If both builds succeed (run the bitbake command again to ensure success) then you will have a kernel image located at:
$OEBASE/build/tmp/deploy/glibc/images/beagleboard/uImage-beagleboard.bin
And a console image filesystem located at:
$OEBASE/build/tmp/deploy/glibc/images/beagleboard/console-image-beagleboard.tar.bz2

Building OSSIE

Now that you have the OpenEmbedded toolchain installed and working properly, let's build OSSIE.

Getting the OSSIE Recipes

The OSSIE recipes are located in the OSSIE SVN repository.

cd $OEBASE
svn --username anon --password ossiesdr co \
  https://ossie.wireless.vt.edu/repos/ossie/ossiedev/branches/jawil06/recipes ossie-recipes

Note: if you skipped the instructions on setting up OpenEmbedded, you must add ossie-recipes to the BBFILES variable in your local.conf as described above.

BitBake OSSIE Images

There are several standard OSSIE images that can be built, as of this writing, the following are available:

• ossie-console-image
• ossie-x11-image
• ossie-dev-console-image
• ossie-dev-x11-image

These images can be easily built with BitBake:

cd $OEBASE/build
bitbake ossie-x11-image # or whichever image you would like to build

Installing Images to SD Card

Once you BitBake one of the provided images you should be able to find it in:
$OEBASE/build/tmp/deploy/glibc/images/beagleboard/

To install your image to an SD card and run the software on your BeagleBoard refer to Getting Started with OSSIE-BeagleBoard using the SD Card Image, but use the uImage and root filesystem you generated instead of the supplied pre-built images.