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!

[malik]

hello,

i tried the vmware image and it works great, but i have the following problem. i do not know much about the dsl uci stuff, only that particular files (embedix resp. qtopia) are added as read only to the system. as i miss for instance sdl devel packages, i do not know how to handle it. where do i get the corresponding sdl packages (and other typical ones for the zaurus develeopment) and how do i add them correctly to the system?

thanx in advance, malik

[kopsis]

where do i get the corresponding sdl packages (and other typical ones for the zaurus develeopment) and how do i add them correctly to the system?

Welcome to one of the problems with stock Zaurus ROM development. There are no "standard" cross-development libraries beyond the ones included in the image. Things like SDL libs are built by the community and how they need to be integrated into your cross-dev environment depends largely on who built them and how.

Though UCI files aren't terribly difficult to modify, in most cases the easiest thing to do is just put the extra cross-dev libraries and headers somewhere under the /home directory on the virtual HD and then modify the application's Makefile to look there for them. If the app uses autoconf then there's often a ./config parameter to specify things like SDL lib location.

[matthis]

I agree that having SDL cross-libs would really be a life-saver!!