User manual

Linux Guide taskit GmbH
5. Compiling and debugging applications
5.1. Setting up a development system
The development system described here assumes that your device is connected to a
separate development computer, using either Ethernet or a serial cable. All transfers
between the two systems occur exclusively over this connection.
The development system does not have any particular hardware demands; a standard PC
is in most cases sufficient. To operate a graphical interface under Linux, a minimum of
64MB RAM and a corresponding graphic card are necessary.
A Linux workstation is normally used as a development computer for an embedded Linux
device. A network card and serial interface are required for the connection
As a basis for such a host system, taskit recommends and supports the freely available
Debian Linux distribution for development. Debian stands out for its stability and good
packet management. Both the current stable version „woody“ and the forthcoming „sarge“
version may be used. Several ways to acquire Debian are described at
http://www.debian.org/distrib/. With a broadband Internet connection, you can download
the current installation CD images using the jigdo tool or a BitTorrent client. The procedure
for using jigdo is described at http://www.debian.org/CD/jigdo-cd/. The first of the seven
CDs in the distribution is sufficient for installing a basic system.
If the development computer has a network connection, additional packages can be
installed over the network. For complete installation instructions for the x86 architecture,
see http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/i386/install.
The following descriptions relate to such a Debian system.
You could also run a Linux system in a virtual environment using a virtual machine such as
VMWare or VirtualPC. This solution, however, severely limits performance and usability.
If the development PC uses Windows 2000 or XP, you can use the cross-platform tool
chain under the Cygwin environment (http://www.cygwin.com/).
Taskit will not grant support for installing and developing on the Microsoft Windows
platform.
5.1.1. Installing the toolchain on Debian
A toolchain for cross compiling is the most important element of the development system.
Precompiled binaries for the i386 architecture are on the starterkit CD.
In the /toolchain directory on the started-kit CD an installation script can be found, this
can only be done by the user root:
cd /dev/cdrom/toolchain
./install_toolchain.sh.
Now the toolchain with GCC 3.4.2 and glibc 2.2.5 is installed.
Additionally you can also install the softfloat toolchain which is much faster when working
with floating point numbers. It has is own install_toolchain.sh script and can be found on
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