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:

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 :)

Filed under: WeeBox Project
Posted at 22:58:06 BST on 26th June 2006.

About Matt Godbolt

Matt Godbolt is a C++ developer living in Chicago. Follow him on Mastodon or Bluesky.