[Mep-dev] Progress on MEP Moblin Development Image

[Michelle]

Thanks to a lot of help from KB5MU and encouragement from others, we've managed to make some progress in understanding and modifying a moblin development image for MEP.

Using VMware to launch moblin as a virtual machine allows development from within the "guest" OS. We'd like to have an image with a larger virtual disk (say, 8GB) than the distribution from Moblin (2GB) in order to install development tools such as eclipse. It's a straightforward process once you figure it out!  :+)  

The development image has all the development libraries needed to write applications for moblin. The list of libraries is extensive, and the moblin site warns that this is the biggest hurdle to getting a "regular" linux workstation up and running. I found this warning to be accurate. Another way to enable a linux station with all the proper development libraries would be to use a package manager to pull all the libraries in. I have not attempted this yet. If you have experience in setting up a package manager, and would like to help see if you can make up a package manager for moblin development, then see this list of libraries in the development image: http://moblin.org/documentation/moblin-sdk/moblin-v2-development-libraries

I think that it would be useful to be able to develop on a workstation for moblin, as working within a development image has a few disadvantages, including slower performance and the need to install any development tools you might be used to using. Having both types of environments available (and maintainable) would be, I think, preferable. 

If you'd like to parallel the effort here, visit www.moblin.org and get a development image to play around with. I'll have the resized, jdk, and eclipse-equipped image available as well for those that want to experiment with this Atom-based environment. 

As soon as it seems like the development image is set up, I'd like to start work on the parts of the software that are somewhat well-defined, such as station discovery. 


More soon!
-Michelle W5NYV


Potestatem obscuri lateris nescis.