Building propgcc on ARM.

Heater.

In an idle moment I tried building propgcc on an ARM board. An ISEE IGEPv2 board like this: http://www.isee.biz/products/processor-boards/igepv2-board

IOf course the rebuild.sh failed. Somewhere in building the info documentation files. Seems the Linaro version of Ubuntu I have running on this machine does not have texinfo or some such installed. After chasing around for a bit a ran out of time to figure out how to get texinfo dev packages on their.

Sorry I don't have the actual failure messages to hand at the moment. Perhaps I'll find time to go through that again at some point.

Anyway, I was just wondering if anyone knew of a magical switch that would stop the build system from trying to build the info documents, after all I don't really want them on my ARM board.

jazzed

Heater. wrote: »

Anyway, I was just wondering if anyone knew of a magical switch that would stop the build system from trying to build the info documents, after all I don't really want them on my ARM board.

I too would like to not build the texinfo stuff, and suspect it may have to do with configure finding one or more packages on the system. The only other package problem i've had is with terminfo - installing ncurses dev package fixes that on debian

pedward

I just got Ubuntu (Natty something) working on my Motorola Razr phone tonight. Now I've got a complete X environment when I dock it in the lapdock.

I was thinking about trying to build pgcc and SIDE for it. I'm pretty sure that I could use it to build natively on ARM, SIDE might be a stretch though.

It works about the same speed as an Atom processor Linux netbook. Dual core 1.2Ghz with 1GB of RAM. And I finally have access to a REAL environment outside of Android!

Some erroneously refer to it as Linux ontop of Linux ontop of android, but it's actually Debian with the Android runtime on top, then Ubuntu chrooted in another location, but all 1 kernel and memory space.

Heater.

pedawrd,

Amazing what you can do on a phone now a days.

I suspect it should be possible to build SIDE there. SIDE is written in C++ using the Qt graphical user interface libraries. I have had success getting Qt based applications running on ARM boards. I also have Qt based programs running on Android on a Samsung Galaxy S.

rwgast_logicdesign

i am doing this right now to, i said it was like a vmm on top of android via a chroot . it is very slick. when looking into all the messy details you are basically sharing kernels as you said, but the squeeze enviroment is being emulated on top of android right..

the race is on... acually if u get gcc and proploader on arm first comgrats! i can test my hardware quicker!

pedward

Android is a runtime environment on top of Linux. The webtop UI on Motorola is just the X server running on the HDMI video output. Android is then run as a windowed application instead of a fullscreen.

You could make a desktop computer that ran Android natively, doing the same thing.

The reality is that Android is a Java runtime that provides an API and a visual interface, not just widgets. Java has the ability to run with many different frontends, whether it's X, MSWindows, or a smartphone. Google decided to build on top of Linux. I think they either use a tiny X server implementation for the phone, or a custom purposed graphical engine.

rwgast_logicdesign

Well im pretty sure its not an X server, ive done tons of kernel development for android. There is no kind of x graphic drivers on an android phone. When running a chroot enviroment you can start Xorg with any window manager you like but no one has figured out how to get X to acually use the display natively so the solution is to startx then run a vnc server and use an android vnc app from the market to log in to the vnc server you started in the terminal. This is dog slow and i do not suggest it. BUT it is cool to vnc into the phone from your pc, now you have a native arm/android dev enviroment running x with a mouse kb and all the goodies!

Ive also noticed anything i have compiled in the chroot enviroment will run on the andoid command line too, so basically you dont even need the android ndk to make android command line apps, just a tip

pedward

This is my RAZR with the lapdock 100:

rwgast_logicdesign

im not sure what im looking at a razor is a phone and thats a big screen. are you runniong debian somewhere in that screen shot or are you just showing me what your desktop looks like?

rwgast_logicdesign

Ok Binutils is failing for me and im getting the same issue with textinfo. I have tried compiling on Debian Arm Distro, and Fedora x86. Both were bare bones installs that I had to install gcc on. Is there required set of librarys needed to get propgcc compiled? I mean you guys made linux binaries on x86 so im pretty sure I shouldnt have any problems on my PC as long as i have the right packages installed.

pedward

Webtop: https://motorola-global-portal.custhelp.com/app/product_page/faqs/p_country_code/US/p/1449,7978

Motorola is running a native debian distro on the phone, with Android running on top of it. They installed an X server and a minimal runtime environment for Firefox and Gnome. I installed an image from the eternity project, which contains a full debian/ubuntu 11 installation.

I've got a shortcut on the apptray that mounts the image and chroot, and launches gnome-panel. The panel is on the right side of the screen and allows me to launch any debian/ubuntu application on the phone.

The HDMI output of the phone drives the LCD display and the USB port goes into host mode, providing access to 2 USB ports on the back, USB keyboard, and USB trackpad.

This effectively turns the RAZR into a dual core laptop with 1GB of RAM, 4G wireless, WiFi, and all the other doodads.

The LCD is 1366x768 and android is run in a window that can be resized and such.