Building Things

Last night I was playing with the cross-compilation environment for the Weebox I’ve built in Scratchbox.

The first thing I’ve tried compiling is MFD itself; just to get a feeling for what kind of problems I might come up against. To be frugal, I’ve set up the Scratchbox ARM emulation enviroment with the uclib C library, which is apparently a lot smaller than glibc, and is more suited to smaller-footprinted applications. Pretty much what I’d want in a 64Mb RAM, 128Mb flash RAM system!

I picked up the MFD source direct from its Subversion repository, and tried to build it…boom, no glibc. Luckily MFD has a patch to build with non glibc calls, which I dutifully installed — much better!

Things I had to note:

• I first needed to configure, build and install install libao, alsalib, libogg, libtremor, libvorbis and libmad. (I may have missed a few out of this, most of these configured and compiled out of the box).
• alsa needed a quick patch — it uses a header file not in the uclib. Luckily the header isn’t actually used, so I could safely comment out the include for it. The files src/alisp/alisp.c and src/names.c can safely have the include for removed.
• when configuring MFD, I used --with-tremor so it uses the integer OGG library instead of the float one (which requires cosf and sinf; neither of which are in the uclib).
• tag.c in MFD needed a patch, again it was using a header which isn’t in my micro distribution; again it wasn’t actually needed and could be safely commented out.

So far so good — I ended up with an MFD binary in ARM format which ran (under emulation) right up until it needed some sound. Which my current linux box doesn’t have — yet. I’ve ordered a USB sound dongle from Ebay (£5, bargain), and hopefully I’ll be able to test MFD under emulation with it.

I’ve also started talking to Technologic Systems about getting a quote for the hardware. I’ll let you know when I get any information back from them.

All in all, pretty successful for an evening’s sit-in-front-of-TV-idly-compiling :)