OpenEmbedded

There is a new GPE Phone Edition VMWare image available from the projects file release section. It now includes the email application and and several updates to libraries and the phoneserver application. The relase notes and changes can be found ... [More] here. If you identify bugs in the applications shipped with the image you can file bug reports in the bugtracker. Enjoy! read more [Less]

Holger Freyther has finally found some time to finish a BitBake class, which is called insane.bbclass. This class is inspired by some early bugs in OpenEmbedded (e.g. the unzip package), and other bug reports and issues we have found during ... [More] development. E.g. when creating the dedicated debug packages. Some packages are inspired by portage QA script. The goal of this BitBake class, similiar to the fail-fast patchset (remember CROSS COMPILE Badness?), is to increase quality and to find issues at compile time before someone is shipping the first package with easy and obvious issues. The insane.bbclass executes a set of unsound and incomplete tests on the packages, the content and the staging area to identify troublesome issues and will report them. These tests include at the moment: A test to find config.log files in the current $WORKDIR to search for the "CROSS COMPILE Badness" string. Finding this string indicates some troubles with the configure script which are in conflict with the OpenEmbedded goals in creating a deterministic system. E.g. gnome- vfs, mp3blaster and mpd are known to fail this test. For convenience these scripts add /usr/include to the CPPFLAGS to find headers. For OpenEmbedded there is no excuse to search in these directories. To solve such issues it might be as easy as specifying additional parameters in EXTRA_OECONF or just fixing the configure script. RPATH inside shipped binaries. RPATH to world writable directories could expose security issues and for an OE based distribution there is probably no excuse in having rpath set. Note that -rpath-link is considered okay and probably should be used. permissions: Well we do not check permissions of directories, setuid'ed binaries and other files. E.g. we do not want world writable executable which might get the setuid bit set. Once such an issue is detected you can fix these by either adjusing the custom do_install task, or the package itself .so symlinks in non -dev packages These symlinks indicate -dev packages and should be shipped in those packages. Normally you will adjust the FILES_* section to fix this issue non debug (-dbg) package RDEPENDS on -dbg package Well a non debug package depends on libraries from a -dbg package. This can only be a packagign bug. This can be either a bug in the package itself, or the package you RDEPEND on. .la files All libtool file should under no circumstances point to the $WORKDIR. This is a bug that should be fixed! And there is a lot to be fixed. This can be either hacked with sed or some proper solution I don't know. For packaged and -native staged files installed should be set to yes (installed=yes). E.g. installed=no is the wrong answer and shows an error. So make sure that installed=yes is found For -native staged files there should be no trace to /usr/include For packaged files the libdir should be /usr/lib Sadly there a lot of -native packages that need fixing, more than one of us can handle alone. .pc files Similiar to libtool files, no direct reference to directories should be included. A bad example is croco from GNOME, and a patch for it is included in OpenEmbedded. checking Architecture and ABI of binary files. If alpha is the PACKAGE_ARCH we will make sure alpha binaries are inside this package. If this is not the case check the compile log and see which compiler was used and fix the buildsystem. The Angstrom Distribution is an early adaptor of this BitBake class and we might find issues and hopefully you will be able to spare a patch and improve the quality. It has never been so easy. [Less]

A new project hosted here was just released to the public - read more about GPE Phone Edition below or just visit the project website. GPE Phone Edition (G(PE)²) is meant to develop and deploy a GTK / GPE based implementation of a LIPS compliant ... [More] software stack. It contains a set of applications, libraries and documentation to build software to be used for mobile phones and similar devices, also see the press release text for more details. read more [Less]

The new service for creating and distributing screenshots is available for use now. You can upload screenshots from your device to the website http://scap.linuxtogo.org directly using latest release of gpe-scap. Its always interesting to visit (and ... [More] feed!) the screenshot service to see which applications are currently under development. If you are interested in helping with scap.linuxtogo.org please thake a look at the project website. Many thanks to Tjabo for this cool contribution! read more [Less]

The GPE website looks a little bit old-fashioned, right? I tried to improve its look a little bit yesterday but my HTML and CSS knowlege is a little bit limited. I believe it is better than before but bug reports are always welcome... as soon as ... [More] bugzilla is working again. :-) Of course here is always the mailingist. After all this unpleasent discussions i started to move the GPE wiki to LinuxToGo as well. This is also a good chance to merge information from the CVSTrac wiki into the main wiki. We have the most important things in here now and quite some updates of things i noticed while editing the new wiki. Like always any help is appreciated - there are still some pages missing and large parts of the wiki might want some updates. Don't hestitiate to touch it - its a wiki! :-) read more [Less]

OpenMoko / FIC decided to build their Linux distribution for the upcoming OpenMoko phone platform on OpenEmbedded. According to Sean Moss-Pultz (OpenMoko architect), "OpenEmbedded is an open, solid, powerful and flexible build system which provides ... [More] commercial grade tools to build our mobile phone platform with." When the first of a series of forthcoming devices -- the FIC Neo1973 -- ships in January 2007, all the machine configurations and bitbake recipies will be uploaded to the OpenEmbedded repository, thus enabling developers to add their applications and to create custom distributions. [Less]

OpenEmbedded is a full-featured development environment allowing users to target a wide variety of devices. Supporting multiple build, release paths and configurations, OpenEmbedded extends the capabilities of your build and release engineers. ... [More] OpenEmbedded uses compilation and configuration caching at most levels to increase developer productivity. OpenEmbedded is a tool which allows developers to create a fully usable Linux base for various embedded systems. It has been designed to be able to handle different hardware architectures, support multiple releases for those architectures, and utilize tools for speeding up the process of recreating the base after changes have been made. Currently it can run on any Linux distribution, and plans are in place to allow it to work under Windows. OpenEmbedded uses the Bitbake task executor in combination with the OpenEmbedded metadata to do all of the above, and it's using monotone as its version control system. OpenEmbedded is the successor of the great OpenZaurus project. Basically OpenEmbedded is a build system that can generate (cross-compile) Software packages for embedded targets. This may include Bootloader, Linux and Applications. It started as a dream and BrainStorming, on how this could be done, and it's already used in real life. Get it Use it Improve it BitBake task executor OpenEmbedded metadata Snapshot Monotone version control system Getting Started instructions Bugtracker Wiki [Less]

The OpenEmbedded mailing lists which were previously hosted by the handhelds.org project will now move to where the SCM and the WebSite of OpenEmbedded is hosted. Due to legal issues with automatic transfering account data, you have to resubscribe ... [More] to the new lists. To subscribe you can use the mailman administration interface at http://lists.openembedded.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openembedded-devel http://lists.openembedded.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openembedded-commits The new list adresses are: [email protected] [email protected] If you want, you can also use the e-mail interface to mailman which listens at [listname][email protected] The lists at handhelds.org will probably be shut off at the end of this week. I want to take this opportunity to thank the handhelds.org administration, especially George France, for having run everything so smooth in the past years -- thanks! Michael 'Mickey' Lauer (mickeyl), 22. August 2006. [Less]

The OpenEmbedded Tinderbox is getting better and better with the huge effort Holger is putting into it, and after some css hacking by Koen it's looking like the main OE website. You can view the tinderbox by clicking on the link in the menu on the left. Please help us with our QA by adding your thoughts to the QA page.

We want to announce that today we made the repositories read-write, to complete the migration to monotone 0.27, which was released in june and includes further performance improvements. The result is that starting today monotone 0.25 will not work ... [More] and developers and users will need to have at least monotone 0.26 installed to continue using and developing OpenEmbedded. Users and developers will need to get a new database. When in doubt, read GettingStarted again, which has been updated to reflect the migration. The now historical timeline of the migration can be found in OpenEmbeddedMigration wiki page. [Less]