Building the Pandora OS from source - Howto?

[Synth]

My Pandora has finally arrived, and I'm interested in working on the distro and the core utilities.


Is there any guides on how to build the Zaxxon distribution?


I've looked around at what doco I can find here: http://pandorawiki.org/Getting_started_with_Pandora_development and it looks like OpenEmbedded is used to build the distro. I've had a bit of a play around with it and the openembedded code from the pandora source repos, but can't seem to make much progress with the build system.


Are there any detailed step by step instructions on how to get this built? Ideally starting with an empty directory and finishing with a built OS.


If not, can someone give me some pointers so I can write doco and automation scripts?

 

[urjaman]

"OpenPandora: Building your own ROOTFS image"

http://blogs.distant-earth.com/wp/?p=90

Some booting and nand layout stuff you should know when doing the OS:

http://blogs.distant-earth.com/wp/?p=79

Some environment generation scripts (also referenced above):

http://git.openpandora.org/cgi-bin/gitweb.cgi?p=pandora-oe-environment.git;a=tree;h=master;hb=master

These are a bit old (so references to Release-2010-05 should be taken with a grain of salt), but should be a good start.

 

[Synth]

Awesome, sounds like a starting point.  Thanks!

 

[hedwards]

I'm curious why you would want to. When I'm running FreeBSD, I'll usualy compile it myself for customization, and so that it uses the newere abilities likes SSE and such. I'm not sure what purpose this would serve when the Pandora has at most 3 models and they all run basically the same stuff.

Or, is this just one of those hobbyist projects just to see if you can?

 

[urjaman]

Because this is the way to create a system which is capable of building new packages to be installed with opkg. Also it is the correct way to test the build system - e.g. when adding patches to various packages. In short: If you want to develop the OS properly, you will need to be able to build the OS. And I dont even have a working build system so whatever...

 

[Synth]

Or, is this just one of those hobbyist projects just to see if you can?

Pretty much.

Not a lot of luck yet, but still working on it.

 

[notaz]

Post your issues here, it might save your time.

One of issues you are definitely going to face are broken source URLs/mirrors, there is pandora mirror which should have everything you need here: http://www.openpandora.org/firmware/sources/

 

[hedwards]

Or, is this just one of those hobbyist projects just to see if you can?

Pretty much.

Not a lot of luck yet, but still working on it.

OK, not that there's anything wrong with that. It's always a good thing when people outside the official team learn to do this sort of thing on their own. It decreases the likelihood of being unable to do so at a critical point in the future.

 

[sixtyfifthbit]

Or, is this just one of those hobbyist projects just to see if you can?

Pretty much.

Not a lot of luck yet, but still working on it.

OK, not that there's anything wrong with that. It's always a good thing when people outside the official team learn to do this sort of thing on their own. It decreases the likelihood of being unable to do so at a critical point in the future.

Not to mention increases the amount of people who can fix bugs, make improvements, and maybe even branch a different OS...

 

[SNESFAN]

finally got a chance to sit down and try this, really want to get this working

as notaz said there are some broken links in the script


 
cd ${OE_ENV_TOP}/bitbake
git clone git://git.openembedded.net/bitbake .
git checkout --track -b 1.10 origin/1.10
# Use 1.8.18 for now for users as 1.10 is not final yet.
#git checkout -b 1.8.18


EDIT cut off half my post >.<

is this the same git http://cgit.openembedded.org/bitbake/ ??

modifying script and repalce .net with .org appears to pull in the files correctly

but when I try to bitbake anything

Traceback (most recent call last):

  File "/home/snesfan/pandora-oe-environment/bitbake/bin/bitbake", line 30, in <module>

    from bb import server

ImportError: cannot import name server

 

bitbake/bin/bitbake has this server

 

   server = bb.server.none

 

ideas on what that should be?

 

nevermind, this appears to be working, easier for me to understand for what I'm trying to do

 

http://boards.openpandora.org/index.php/topic/12336-new-next-image-help-needed/page-2#entry232564