One of the very first steps of porting MeeGo to your device, ARM or X86, is to generate a reference device image - often you take the reference device that is most close to your target device.
This is done through kickstart files, provided on repo.meego.com and using the image-creator (henceforth mic2) tool. However mic2 is not the best in terms of portability to other Linux distributions, mostly because of the requirements/bugs of dependant packages on other distros (pykickstart, yum, qemu, etc). In #meego-arm IRC channel, we have to resort to telling people to install a Fedora VM and install mic2 in there. That's a bit of a failure as we should be able to provide a full solution within MeeGo itself for building MeeGo images. We are currently providing the MeeGo SDKs (currently Handset or Netbook) as image files. These are used through chroot methods or booting in QEMU. My proposal is that in these SDK's: * that we include mic2 as well as it's dependencies, including the static QEMU binaries for ARM image building. In fact, my personal image building exists in a Fedora chroot underneath a Ubuntu system so it is technically possible. Challenges are the usual when it comes to ARM and QEMU: vdso, mmap_min_address, selinux and so on (easily diagnosable). As well, in general this approach means you need a SSSE3 processor to generate a ARM chroot. For those who doesn't have that, they can use Fedora VM's in case. When someone wants to generate a MeeGo image, we can then point them to the SDK image for easy image generation instead of going out of the way to install another distribution. Ideally, for someone wanting to adapt MeeGo on a device we should have a short path for customizing MeeGo: Package up your software with spectacle (and/or .spec). Upload to your company/community OBS. Take that binary package, in the RPM repository, generated by your OBS. Add repository line to a kickstart file, package name to %packages. Build new image in SDK. Deploy. And that's a compelling device porter environment. How does this proposal sound? Best regards, Carsten Munk Nokia N900 hardware adaptation team member _______________________________________________ MeeGo-dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.meego.com/listinfo/meego-dev
