I'd like to weigh in on this subject too.
I've gone through the procedures in order to do my first "bitbake base-image" on a clean install of Ubuntu 9.10
What I'd like to see is information all in one place, a cookbook of how to build your Angstrom image.
The information needs to be accessible to someone who has a fair degree of technical skill, and intelligence, but can't assume a lot of knowledge about Angstrom or OpenEmbedded, otherwise they probably wouldn't need to be reading the instructions in the first place.
In my opinion, it would be better if the scripts dealt with the OETREE directory living somewhere else rather than in the root directory, for the reasons presented earlier (namely that you need root access to write to it)
Yes, it's clear to most people here that you need root access to install the relevant packages as well, however this can be accomplished using sudo quite easily.
On the subject of packages, it would be good to have this listed on the same page in a requirements section. It's also not entirely clear what packages need to be installed via the error message that bitbake gives - it mentions the name of the missing binary, but not the package it is contained in (eg svn vs subversion and texi2html)
Creating the $OETREE directory at the root means that (by default) it's owned by root, so you need to then use a root shell, or judicious use of sudo to follow the latter instructions to get the files in there for the build. Once you've done this however, bitbake refuses to be run as root, and wants to be run as a regular user. You then need to change ownership of everything and re-run it as a regular user.
It would be cleaner to assume a build beginning in ~/OE rather than in /OE.
Finally, the bitbake process, even for the base-image, is a very long process. It also is prone to exit with strange errors - such that I've had to re-run it three times so far and it's now looking like it will be able to complete.
Note that this is all on a clean installation of Ubuntu 9.10 - I installed a server system, with Open SSH Server as the only additional selected package during installation. After booting it up, I did an apt-get update, apt-get upgrade, reboot, apt-get build-essential and apt-get linux-headers-`uname -r`
I feel that this is a good, albeit, basic starting point to begin with, so it would be great to have a list of additional packages required on top of this rather minimal system.
I don't want this to sound like I'm criticising the efforts of people who have produced the documentation we already have, I just want to provide the point of view of someone who is quite technically capable, but new to this area, so I am able to look at it with a fresh set of eyeballs and (hopefully) no preconceived notations.
My thanks go out to everyone who has put in the effort to get us to where we are already, there's a monumental amount of work involved in a project like this, and it's wonderful that it's all available to have a community built around it...
Cheers,
Kai
