Sharp Zaurus Sdk The Easy Way, QEMU/LiveCD based devel environment Options

[kopsis]

From some of the discussion in the General topics, it's become clear that getting the Zaurus SDK up and running is a stumbling block for aspiring Zaurus developers. In an effort to lower the bar, I've created an entire development environment (based on Damn Small Linux) that has the toolchain and SDK pre-installed in a complete lightweight Linux distro and ready to run.

I've written an article that details the advantages of this approach along with download and installation instructions. You can find the article at
http://kopsisengineering.com/kopsis/SharpZaurusSdkDsl

I had initially hoped that this solution would be radically simpler than the tool installation itself. I'm not entirely certain that I've succeeded in that. I may just be pushing the complexity into a different area (getting Damn Small Linux and possibly QEMU running) so I'm very interested in getting feedback from anyone who tries my approach.

Note that these tools are for Sharp ROM development only. They will definitely not work for OpenZaurus, and I suspect they won't work for pdaXrom either. If this approach proves to be sufficiently easy for people, then I may try to set up similar DSL based environments for those systems.

Good luck!

[slapout]

Wow Kopsis, this sounds great. I was just about to try installing the Sharp tools for the third time. (I tried it with Red Hat 9 and with Mepis, but couldn't get either one to work. I was about to try it with Mandrake 10. I also tried the DemoLinux CD with the tools, but couldn't figure how to use it -- it keep trying to write to the CD)

I'm going to try this out as soon as I get a chance. Thanks for putting this all together.

[Ragnorok]

Wow Kopsis, this sounds great. I was just about to try installing the Sharp tools for the third time. (I tried it with Red Hat 9 and with Mepis, but couldn't get either one to work.
...(geschnippt)...

- This is really cool, Kopsis. I mentioned this in another thread as a good way for a newbie to get going, and here you just did it. Good Form! ™ And it does seem to be a good way to go, particularly for those poor souls who are forced to use Winbloze. I pity them, but you've really been a saviour, and that's a Good Thing! ™ More Z developers can't be bad.
- I've had no trouble getting the original tools to work on RH9 ... that's my current dev environment. There are plenty of clues here on the forum for getting it working, or I wouldn't have it set up. (wink)
- Despite drakecoldwinter's woes I'm thinking of trying Suse for the next platform, which will be available One Day Real Soon. I'll base it on my existing RH9 setup; having a working environment to refer to should make things easier.
- Time will tell, or it won't!

[GadgetGuy]

I have installed QEMU and the Sharp environment on my Windows 2K PC, and it works great . Thank you kopsis for the instructions!

Before I really start using it, I wanted to figure out, how I can transfer files from the Windows environment to the Sharp environment and back? Or, asking it differently: how would I move the arm executable file to my Zaurus (which is not connected to my PC) after it has been created? Or, how would I move source code from my Windows PC into the Sharp environment?

Is there maybe a way to explore the .img file from Windows? How?

Or is there another solution?