Pdaxrom: Development

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Revision as of 16:10, 2 March 2005

1 Native or cross compilation
2 Cross compilation
3 Native compilation
4 Building an ipk
5 Compiling Qt Apps
6 Compiling the distribution from scratch

Native or cross compilation

Cross compilation means compiling application on a standard pc, up to now a x86 pc running Linux, that will runs on the Zaurus. Native Compilation means compiling application on the Z itself.

Cross compilation is (normally) a lot faster than on the compilation on the Z, but developpers do not always have cross compilation in mind when they write their configure / makefile / build scripts. Meaning it might not work out of the box. When compiling natively your are not subject to cross compilation problems, but other problems arise:

compilation might require more ram than the Z have
compilation might creates a lot of files that takes a lot of space on your storage
and most importantly the compilation might requires some external tools that are normally found on a standard Linux distribution but for space reason are not by default installed with pdaxrom. (or worse not yet compiled). For instance you might need to install perl just to be able to compile your application.

Cross compilation

See the installation and tutorial section inside the documentation on [1].

Note that starting from RC5 the directory /opt/arm/3.3.2 has been renamed to /opt/arm/3.3.2-vfp so if you use the latest sdk read use 3.3.2-vfp where you see 3.3.2

Native compilation

more space

The space problem can be easily solved by mounting an nfs partition of a unix server of yours. Then you can have as much space as is available on the server.

Using a nfs or samba drive on MS windows server will probably NOT work because of the difference of the filesystem (no symbolic link etc..). If you only have a windows machine there is still a solution:

create an image file with dd
format this image with ext2 format
mount this image.

This will not speed up the compilation.

more ram

The ram problem can be solved by creating a swap (search on this subject). You can even create a swap image on an network drive if your are afraid to damage your cards/ internal flash.

This will definitely not make the build faster.

more speed

If you have a linux pc you can use distcc to speed up a bit the compilation. Distcc allows to distribute the compilation between the zaurus and the pc.

For now see this thread

Building an ipk

....

Compiling Qt Apps

To natively compile Qt applications, make sure you use gcc with CXXFLAGS=-fno-rtti, otherwise you might get into problems at the linking stage, with errors such as "undefined reference to `typeinfo for QWidget'".

For further info, see [2].