OESF Portables Forum
General Forums => General Discussion => Topic started by: craigtyson on June 30, 2005, 07:48:49 am
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As a follow on to OMRO's "Developer School" Post the general drift was that some form of online course or book would be the most appropriate / cost effective way to progress the issue of getting newbies into developing on the Zaurus.
The outline of the course still needs to be thrashed out so do any prerequisits but the idea is to create a bounty for the production of the course materials and a set of tools which can be used to start programming with minimal time spent building the development environment.
As a side effect this may also lead to more commercial development by redusing the time overheads required to port applications from other environments.
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This would sure be a good idea.
Right now the Sharp (based) ROMs are the most stable solution for the newest devices (I own a C3000), so until this changes and other ROMs become usable enough in real life situation, I am not likely to make more than brief installs to look at the progress made, and there's no chance I'd start developing for a ROM that cannot yet be used on the field.
This means that I'd be interested first in Sharp / Qt stuff, but I voted for the "All ROMs / Platforms" option nonetheless since in the end I'm sure that this might provide interesting alternatives...
Developing new apps for non Sharp ROMs means that the ROMs themselves must be working bug-free (or close to that) first.
This would be true at every new device release, and I do realize that some talented developers owning a Cx00 or a 5xxx/6xxx device would certainly consider alternative ROMs stable enough to start developing on it... But newcomers are most likely to purchase one of the new devices, so if they want to try new apps and find out that they have to install a new ROM first, and that it doesn't necessarily works without glitches, then they'll probabaly be overall disappointed regardless of the quality of the new application.
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i was thinking if we could get a 100 or so people to put up $10+ we would have a bounty which would attract some attention. i might be dreaming of course......
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I've tried twice to install the Z dev stuff and failed both times. I think it would be nice to have some more documentation on the subject.
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Does the lack of X/PDAX votes mean no one is interested or are you including your votes in the "needs to cover every thing" votes?
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I'm missing at least gpe, pixil, familiar and angstrom. I also fail to see why OpenEmbedded fails into the 'ROM' categorie.
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Forgot about Familiar. and hadnt heard of pixil. I thought GPE was another fork of OPIE so kind of implied its part of OE. But I dont see why it couldnt be part of the course aslong as its requested / sponsored.
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Forgot about Familiar. and hadnt heard of pixil. I thought GPE was another fork of OPIE so kind of implied its part of OE. But I dont see why it couldnt be part of the course aslong as its requested / sponsored.
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Opie isn't part of OE. OE is a buildsystem, like make of portage and not a distribution. Like mickeyl said before: you can make OE build sharproms and pdaxroms if you want.
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OK My mistake.
But the object of this poll is to find out who is willing to contribute to a bounty to pay for a(some) developer(s) to write a course and provide easy to use tools and code samples that a programmer could pickup and start using assuming they have knowledge of C or another C like language and start developing without the need for spending a week getting a development system together and or trawling through volumes of internet info.
If Iv mislabelled anything then again apologies but doesn’t this point something out. If long term users of Zaurus devices arnt clear on what’s what how do we expect newbies to get started. Something my old digital electronics tutor used to keep drumming into us was k.i.ss keep it simple
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- I'm with euroclie; all ROMs is an excellent goal, but for Hiro the Sharp ROM is the only game in town. (little boy pout) I did the reverse - while I have interest in all ROMs, and X-based things in particular, I run the default Sharp ROM and have little intention of changing until I'm convinced alternatives function reliably. Hiro has never crashed, except last night when I attempted to flash tetsu's 18a kernel, and I expect that level of stability. That's one of the many reasons I don't do WinCE. (wry grin)
- I have a development environment all set up for the Sharp ROM and have fiddled with BlueZ a bit to date. I'm still futzing with the tools in Eclipse to get a full IDE environment established. (grin) Winbloze has spoiled me in that regard. I really do miss the integrated real-time debugger, el-spiffo single-step, var watch, and memory access tools when I don't have them. (sniffle)
- Is there any reason someone couldn't just tarball the relevant directories on their environment and let people download and untar it? As long as the base OS were the same, it should lay down and run with minimal setup, no? That would at least be the fast road to a known functional development setup.
- Then they'd just have to climb that Qtopia learning curve. (bemused grin)
- That's my half-nyble...
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- Is there any reason someone couldn't just tarball the relevant directories on their environment and let people download and untar it? As long as the base OS were the same, it should lay down and run with minimal setup, no? That would at least be the fast road to a known functional development setup.
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The problem is that the base OS is seldom ever the same. There are nearly as many flavors of Linux as there are Linux users. And what about folks with Windows or OS X? It's the non-Linux folks that are most challenged by toolchain setup. That's why I'm looking at offering the QEMU route. Then the base OS for the toolchain can be the same right down to the kernel version without forcing people to switch distros, dual boot, or trade in their PowerBooks for PCs
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A solution for Kopsis's issue about different OS's would be to focus on development ON the Zaurus itself. I've had Kopsis's python image on my SD card for a while now and have written some toy programs and it would be nice to getter better at it, since it works very well. I've also recently installed Maslovsky's C/C++ image but have only used it to compile somebody else's C code and it works fine too.
Felipe
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...And what about folks with Windows or OS X?...[div align=\"right\"][a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=87611\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a][/div]
- People use Winbloze to build for the Z? (befuddled frown) Curious. I went the dual-boot route, just because that seems so ... wrong! (snicker)
- From what I understand OS X is essentially an Unix flavor. While there are a zillion flavors, the basic operation is essentially the same among them all. It should be possilbe to write an "installer" that tweaks the tarball accordingly, perhaps moving things from a common "install" directory to where they belong for that distro.
- The first thing I did out of the military is write an install script for an Unix-based document management system that ran on at least four different vendor flavors (SunOs, AIX, IRIX, HP-UX), and at least three versions of each of those flavors, one of which went from System-V based to BSD-based in a single major release (SunOs 4 to Solaris, if I recall). The installer figured out who it was was running on, configured the installation for that flavor (including installing one of two Oracle versions, configuring it, and building the base tables and views the product required for that Oracle version on that Unix flavor). It built scripts on-the-fly to manage the installation (take it down, bring it up, start/stop components, query components, etc) so it worked consistently across all flavors and versions.
- Then I wrote the installer for the Unix client, same set of systems for install.
- Then I wrote an InstallShield installer for the client piece, for Winbloze. The server systems would only run on some flavor of Unix. (grin)
- Thing is, a properly crafted script should be able to take care of the most common Unix flavors. The big things are the kernel version, and what options each flavor uses for common commands like ls, ps, mv, cp, tar, etc ... they seem to share the commands themselves, but few of them ever shared options! (wry grin) And the shell in use ... the user had to know enough to launch the right script for their shell.
- The big thing for a tarball dev installer would be developing for systems that aren't available. I only have Red Hat 9 here, because that suffices for Z development, and I've always used Red Hat (have four boxen of RH). I can put some other Intel-based distro on two of the other three boxen to make sure it works for them, and maybe upgrade the third to something a little newer that RH9, but I can do nothing about OS X. Don't have that at my disposal.
- This doesn't address Winbloze. Ooops! (wolfish grin)
- Then again, maybe it's more complex than that. (shrug) It just doesn't *seem* like it should be. (cheshire grin) I've done development long enought to know what that means! (drool)
- Just my half-nyble
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Then again, maybe it's more complex than that.
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It depends on what you're trying to do. If you just want to cross-compile for the Z, one could, with a reasonable amount of effort, create an Embedix/Qtopia intallation program/script that gives you a working environment on a variety of Linux flavors. OS X is a bit more challenging because there are no "official" SDK binaries that support it. I think folks have managed to build their own OS X - Zaurus toolchains but I'm not certain how reliable or compatible they are. For Windows I don't believe anyone has successfully created SDK binaries. With something like Cygwin it may be possible, but the level of effort seems pretty steep.
However (there's always a however), one of the really nice features of the Zaurus Qtopia SDK is that it comes with a virtual frame buffer and x86 libraries that actually allow you to build your apps and run them directly on your Linux box (without the need for a heavyweight Zaurus emulator). This makes debugging so much easier because now you can just fire up your app in gdb and have full source level debugging. But all of that is Linux only -- and not just Linux but Linux with a specific gcc toolchain. The SDK doesn't come with that toolchain, it expects your distro to provide it. And it's an ancient version (gcc 2.95) so that's where things get complicated. Not to say that it wouldn't be possible to figure out proper x86 gcc 2.95 installation procedures for all the various distros and script that up too, but now we're talking major effort (have you counted Linux distros lately? ).
Developing directly on the Z is a pretty good solution. I use Python on mine quite frequently and I've also used the ZGCC stuff to actually build Python. ZGCC is brutally slow and needs a bunch of swap to be practical, but it works well. But I also have the luxury of a C760 with a 4GB microdrive and a 1GB SD card. I have this feeling that there's a large body of less fanatical Zaurus users with older Z's that would find on Z development less pleasant.
I'll be releasing my Damn Small Linux based Zaurus SDK (with easy to follow installation instructions) soon (just waiting for the 1.3 release of DSL). That will provide a small "Live CD" environment for x86 boxes and a QEMU environment that can work on any platform that can run QEMU. Hopefully some folks will find it useful.
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Winbloze
I wish people would stop doing that.
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Then again, maybe it's more complex than that.
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It depends on what you're trying to do. If you just want to cross-compile for the Z, one could, with a reasonable amount of effort, create an Embedix/Qtopia intallation[div align=\"right\"][a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=88318\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a][/div]
So you're saying every Z in the world runs qtopia and if we want to develop stuff it should be qtopia? I'm a bit offended with that generalization.
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Winbloze
I wish people would stop doing that.
[div align=\"right\"][a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=88327\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a][/div]
Oh come on! It's fun poking fun at them, until they steal your idea and force your company out of buisness...
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ok, I was going to stay out of this, but it seems the conversation here is getting a little crazy.
I realize this is a poll, to vote on which path is best to take, so here's my 2 cents:
Start somewhere (doesn't matter where). If you need a starting point, the Sharp ROM would be fine. It doesn't matter if it's the best, the worst or whatever. It *is* however a starting point. The advantages here is:
1) every Sharp started there. All the new sharps start with the Sharp ROM. For new models, they have little choice but to use it in the beginning until someone has had their new model for a while.
2) It's not a moving target. It's a known quantity that something solid could be built. While it's not the easiest to develop for (and I'm not a programmer, so I may not be qualified to say all this, my apologies), it is something that can be a common starting point across the board to all Z's.
Once that has been done to the majority's satisfaction, you can then seqway into other distros, which I'm sure various people have their own interest in it.
It would mean of course, that developers would have a solid foundation that could reach all the models (with some variations I'd suspect). I've noticed some apps that are common to all models that work great. Then there are those that only work in certain models.
At the very least, this would be getting something done, rather than bikeshedding on perfection ....
I'd suspect the next big thing would then be showing a developer how he could make his program work in other ROMs, whether it be oz/gpe/whatever. Effort there would be invaluable.
That being said, and not being a programmer, my ability to contribute to the effort is limited. I was asked at one point if I could get something working, as they couldn't figure out what was wrong. Here is the answer I slapped together in hopes it could help someone else searching out there:
https://www.oesf.org/index.php?title=Compiling_on_the_6000L (https://www.oesf.org/index.php?title=Compiling_on_the_6000L)
I followed what the links did, and was able to:
1) compile and run the example program in the console
2) compile and run the example program which ran in the qtopia environment
Again, it's not meant to make everyone happy, but rather just to provide a starting point where "something" could get going ...
Let's not concern ourselves with which is better or worse, but rather how about we just start with what's common to all Z's?
A thought - a wiki isn't a bad way to go here. That way if anyone has a specific interest, they could always add a page to their interest of course.
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So you're saying every Z in the world runs qtopia and if we want to develop stuff it should be qtopia? I'm a bit offended with that generalization.
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How on earth did you reach that conclusion? I used Qtopia as an example simply because that's what I'm familiar with. The question at hand was about the difficulty of making a cross-platform universal installer. I commented as someone with knowledge of what it would take to do that for the "official" Sharp Qtopia SDK. I was intentionally not generalizing. My very first sentence was "It depends on what you're trying to do." I intentionally left the door open to the whole range of options -- but I'm not qualified to elaborate on many of them.
Use whatever works for you but don't get "offended" when someone else chooses differently.
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So you're saying every Z in the world runs qtopia and if we want to develop stuff it should be qtopia? I'm a bit offended with that generalization.
[div align=\"right\"][a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=88349\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a][/div]
How on earth did you reach that conclusion? I used Qtopia as an example simply because that's what I'm familiar with. The question at hand was about the difficulty of making a cross-platform universal installer. I commented as someone with knowledge of what it would take to do that for the "official" Sharp Qtopia SDK. I was intentionally not generalizing. My very first sentence was "It depends on what you're trying to do." I intentionally left the door open to the whole range of options -- but I'm not qualified to elaborate on many of them.
Use whatever works for you but don't get "offended" when someone else chooses differently.
[div align=\"right\"][a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=88424\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a][/div]
Also this thread is to find out who would willing to put up some sort of bounty for a beginners course in Z development. If you have installed one of the more advanced / build it yourself distro's on the Z then your probably already in advance of what this thread is about.
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Winbloze
I wish people would stop doing that.
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- Sorry, man. Can't help it most daze. Automagic is nice ... 'til it breaks. Then I for one prefer the ability to bypass the broken automagic and fix it. Easy with Linux and a little know-how. Much more difficult to impossible for MickeySawft. So ... (shrug) ... it just pops out.
- I'll try to reign in, just for you. If'n I fail, don't take it personally (wink)...
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I understood Ev1l's post as wishing that people would stop using the-OS-that-must-not-be-named (with apologies to J.K. Rowling) but maybe is my generous interpretation.
Felipe
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D'oh!
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Winbloze
I wish people would stop doing that.
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Most second that!
I've been wanting to code for Z for a month now ... "unfortunately", I use WindowsXP and for the good part of last month, I've been flashing and reflashing my Z with the various roms, because each one almost provide what I need, only to disappoint at the end with a quirk! That, is also why I want to code for Z.
I've coded for PocketPCs, Palm and HandheldPCs embedded devices but so far all the development platform is on Windows. For Palm, there was Metrowerks that I could use until I switch to PilRC tools and cygwin. As for PPCs and HPCs, it was basically a free download of their IDE for embedded devices + a free download of their SDK for the target platform.
Metrowerks and the IDE tools from MS are basically polished developer products that require the developer to just download and install. The developer has to just concentrate on designing, writing and testing the app he is writing for the device he targets. Either tools feature an emulator that runs on Windows, with the exception of HPC2000 platform, although I mostly code for HPCPro and it works upwards anyway.
PilRC tools and cygwin required abit more effort on the developer to setup the tools, but no rocket science here. It may be a bit daunting for developers not used to command prompts, but since I had my share of unix, linux and dos, it was not too much to bear. Fortunately, I could test out the code using the POSE tools (Palm emulator) on windows although I was not able to (nor need to) debug the code on the fly. For the most part, output debug strings was sufficient.
The one theme common in many reviews I have seen so far for Zaurii products is that there are lesser apps available for users compared to that of Palm or PPCs. If its an indication at all, it implies that there are many more developers on these two other platforms. Here I mean app developers. I doubt these developers would be able to write a kernel for PalmOS or WindowsMobile OS or the likes, but they write good apps that end users love and *use* on a daily basis. If we want more app developers, we need to make it simple to setup the development environment and tools for writing an app for the Z. And having a tool (say cygwin?) on windows is a big bonus. The last I check, there appear to be more pure app developers for windows than there are for linux.
oh, and did I mention that the downloads for the tools for all the platforms I mentioned came below 80mb? Metrowerks came in even lesser ... around 40mb I believe. An environment requiring 7gb of space is daunting for even commercial developers, much less hobbists. I kinda refuse to install VisualStudio.Net when I find it requires 2+ gb of install space and stuck to an older development environment which provided adequate functionalities I needed.
I hope against odds that a Z development distro can be had on a CD or ISO download where developers can just order or download, install, and start coding. This vs download, install, troubleshoot, search, download, install, troubleshoot ...
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One for Cacko would probobly produce the biggest impact, so many use it.
A complete THEMING howto for Cacko would be simply awsome All themes I see are for Sharp Rom
Erik, (Wanabe Cacko Dev)
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for the past couple of months, i been looking for tools to develop for the z. I probably am looking in the wrong direction.
the sharprom has a directory which includes a dev and makedev file. what is this really used for?
were can i find dev tools which will work for the sharprom c1000? I tried a few and failed to manage to install due to probable fat partition. do i need ext2? damn me i should of grabed a c3100. im triyng to get mame to function properly on the z.
hope someone has a solutuion. my time is short so i rather develop than build dev tools or guess what works.
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Dunno if you figured out what the MAKEDEV script was for or not Cresho, but it's basically a script to create the device files in the /dev directory with the proper major and minor numbers.
Way back when, most of the device files you have already (or are magically created for you by your system when you plug something in or it gets detected by the kernel) didn't exist. And when a new linux kernel would come out or some new 3rd party device drivers came out for some hardware, you could compile it sure... but you wouldn't be able to get at your hardware until you created the proper device nodes in /dev
MAKEDEV knows about a bunch of devices already so you could tell it to create certain types and it'd just do it for you. But sometimes you have to go and use mknod itself which is what MAKEDEV actually calls to do it's dirty work anyway. mknod creates the block or character special files in /dev with whatever name, type, major and minor number is needed.
You can do a
man MAKEDEV
man mknod to get a little more information on it
Hmm... on the other end of things... did this fall apart somewhere? Or did someone make something to help people develop? It's unfortunate there are people that get all in a huff when their preferred distro's name is mangled or completely ignored but as CraigTyson said, the fact that people who have been using Z's for a very long time can't get the names right just goes to show how needed something like this is.
That attitude of taking offense at imagined insults is exactly what keeps people from wanting to bother with the other systems that are out there for the Z. I mean really, who wants to deal with people that can't seem to understand that not everyone is an expert at all things Zaurus and that the only way they can TRY to become an expert is by asking all the stupid questions in the FIRST place.
Anyway, I would be willing to pay good $$$ to get help going towards making something workable for people to start out with and begin to learn how to do things. Perhaps we might even be able to work through example applications and interfacing with the various libraries and what not? I think that would be most helpful to get more developers that would be able to help contribute to all the various projects that are going on.
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- Typing this on Hiro so it may be short. Depends on when the battery gives up the ghost. (grin)
- Re-reading this thread/ it strikes me that it may be the very simplest to create a CD with a Linux distro and the dev tools/ essentially pre-installed and ready to go . The neophyte Z coder simply installs the whole thing on a spare box (partition, whatever) fires it up, and starts coding. With a Knoppix-like system it could be made to boot from the cd and run directly/ but taht would be more difficult, imho.
- The goal would not be to satisfy everyone. The goal would be to have *a* ready-built system that a newbie developer coulld use easily. It would be for the Sharp ROM for the previously mentioned reason ... EVERY Z comes with it out-of-the-box/ so it's a known quantity.
- Oops! Batt's red...
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well, I customised the zgcc cramfs image for my own use because it didn't do what I wanted to. But now I can use it to compile C/C++ console apps, Qt apps with GUI and kernel modules all from a single image. I also made the installation simpler so I can just stick it onto my CF card and move it between different Zs. If anyone is interested have a look at http://www.users.on.net/~hluc/myZaurus/custom.html#gcc (http://www.users.on.net/~hluc/myZaurus/custom.html#gcc) and download it from http://www.users.on.net/~hluc/myZaurus/stuff/zgcc2-95-2.zip (http://www.users.on.net/~hluc/myZaurus/stuff/zgcc2-95-2.zip)
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Any news on a RAD/IDE (Delphi/visualage alike) Id love to put some gui apps together or even just VGAify some of the older 5500 apps out there for the C series.
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Any news on a RAD/IDE (Delphi/visualage alike)
Not RAD, but in other ways Delpi alike, namely
a Pascal binding to Qt/E. No problems in
setting up cross-compile, lightning fast
compile times.
Pascal Qt/E Zaurus Development (http://users.pandora.be/Jan.Van.hijfte/qtforfpc/qtedemo.html)
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First I would like to split it into few other options:
- qt/e for sharprom clones
- gtk2 for pdax
- other X11 based for pdax
- qt/e for opie using OE derived distros
- gtk2 using OE derived distros
- other X11 based using OE derived distros
Most of qt/e stuff from sharprom clones can be build for OPIE (if does not need libsl or libdtm) - sometimes it fail because gcc 3.4 is more strict when it comes to C++.
GTK and other X11 based stuff can be build for OE distros or PdaX (or even for those who use X/QT with sharprom clones).
Console stuff can work anyway (after rebuild).
I planned to work on getting easy to install developer stuff in OE derived distros but first have to get 2.6 kernel fixed as my 1G sdcard is not supported now (other cards does not have that problem). With card of such big storage I could work on getting developer stuff working, fixing its dependencies etc. - It is harder to get it working when I have to use 64M rootfs in flash and does not have handy SD card (my 256M sdcard is used in camera so I have only 64M card for such tests ;(
more about it later..
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Is anybody working on this? I would like to learn how to develop using Windows XP and I have PayPal money burning a hole in my pocket to contribute!
What happened to the $10/person idea???
Winbloze
I wish people would stop doing that.
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Most second that!
I've been wanting to code for Z for a month now ... "unfortunately", I use WindowsXP and for the good part of last month, I've been flashing and reflashing my Z with the various roms, because each one almost provide what I need, only to disappoint at the end with a quirk! That, is also why I want to code for Z.
I've coded for PocketPCs, Palm and HandheldPCs embedded devices but so far all the development platform is on Windows. For Palm, there was Metrowerks that I could use until I switch to PilRC tools and cygwin. As for PPCs and HPCs, it was basically a free download of their IDE for embedded devices + a free download of their SDK for the target platform.
Metrowerks and the IDE tools from MS are basically polished developer products that require the developer to just download and install. The developer has to just concentrate on designing, writing and testing the app he is writing for the device he targets. Either tools feature an emulator that runs on Windows, with the exception of HPC2000 platform, although I mostly code for HPCPro and it works upwards anyway.
PilRC tools and cygwin required abit more effort on the developer to setup the tools, but no rocket science here. It may be a bit daunting for developers not used to command prompts, but since I had my share of unix, linux and dos, it was not too much to bear. Fortunately, I could test out the code using the POSE tools (Palm emulator) on windows although I was not able to (nor need to) debug the code on the fly. For the most part, output debug strings was sufficient.
The one theme common in many reviews I have seen so far for Zaurii products is that there are lesser apps available for users compared to that of Palm or PPCs. If its an indication at all, it implies that there are many more developers on these two other platforms. Here I mean app developers. I doubt these developers would be able to write a kernel for PalmOS or WindowsMobile OS or the likes, but they write good apps that end users love and *use* on a daily basis. If we want more app developers, we need to make it simple to setup the development environment and tools for writing an app for the Z. And having a tool (say cygwin?) on windows is a big bonus. The last I check, there appear to be more pure app developers for windows than there are for linux.
oh, and did I mention that the downloads for the tools for all the platforms I mentioned came below 80mb? Metrowerks came in even lesser ... around 40mb I believe. An environment requiring 7gb of space is daunting for even commercial developers, much less hobbists. I kinda refuse to install VisualStudio.Net when I find it requires 2+ gb of install space and stuck to an older development environment which provided adequate functionalities I needed.
I hope against odds that a Z development distro can be had on a CD or ISO download where developers can just order or download, install, and start coding. This vs download, install, troubleshoot, search, download, install, troubleshoot ...
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Dunno, my original thought was to put together a bounty for a development distro with examples / step by step info and how tos or tutorials. As the poll didnt rase much interest at the time and the thread detracted into MS abuse i didnt see it going to far. as it turns out there is now a dsl distro for development but iv yet to try it. To be honest with out an IDE/RAD Im not sure how far id get. My C was never great, but Delphi allowed me to put my pascal to work in a gui environment.