Did Anyone Purchase the Book / "Mastering Embedded Linux Development (Vasquez, Simmonds 2025)."

General Discussion
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1

I purchased the book. Did you purchase this book?

I am on page 255 on making rootfs stuff happen on my builds. I am going about the readings as a note taker for now, i.e. as I have not purchased the beagleplay board just yet.

Anyway, I read over 200 pages of fastener jargon and went to sleep for three days. Boring. Okay, it is sort of fun with all the history and machines that make the smaller components but still daily life as a bolt mfg. cannot be all that much enjoyable. Who knows really? I may never make it in mfg. at all.

Anyway, here inlays detail about the book…

It is a heated, neat read full of Linux commands, beagleboard.org beagleplay referencing, and even when not in beagleplay territory, one finds many ways to associate the beagle family of boards into the scenarios for use case instances.

So, would I purchase it knowing what I know now? Yay or Nay?

I say yes, Yay.

Outside of that idea and my overwhelming support in the blinders for helping out a hardware and software builder of sorts like the beagleboard.org personnel and their accomplishments, I have a bit of advice to share.

Life sucks, do not quit. As most of you know or some or actually no one really, I mow grass and do heave-hoe work still. Would I consider myself a go-to for BKED (behind keyboard every day) work, no.

I would say, Nay. The reason I say so is this fact, I completely get too emotional on where things are headed with no known cause for concern.

So, say this idea. “Mike is taking a left all of sudden and Susan hates when Mike takes rights when traversing the office.” Simple things like this idea are too much data.

So, me sitting reading all these books and performing for no apparent reason is giving me fright in life.

I should not care about what Susan or Mike thinks and go with calmness and solitude in approach but Nooooooooo, I get fed up and resemble an angry individual without peer support.

So, back the fields until I can figure out how to handle civility.

Oh. The book.

Good grab if you got an extra $40.00 for the amazon.com type digital version. There are, to my knowledge, no Linux type book readers for now that can read the amazon book type.

Who knew you could build one yourself? I did not until I found you guys/gals doing things with computers.

Anyway…enough banter and cascading.

Seth

P.S. End result, the book is factual for kernel 6.6.x and that is as far as I have made it.

I will need to test my notes and perform additional inquiries but for now, awesome book. I have about an unlimited amount of notes to rummage through for now.

2

Anyway, if you are reading this book, good.

if not and if there is no way to correlate chat or directives dedicated to the book from you, okay.

I will keep reading and post less.

Seth

3

Unfortunately I purchased the third edition and even more sadly I did not touch it until after the return window on amazon expired. Typically, I return most of the Packt stuff, out of all the books they have only a couple were close to being good and did not get returned.

4

This one is not so bad. They left the crosstool-ng stuff behind to use another form of bottom-up building.

I have done it with Buildroot so far with a working system.

I got Yocto to boot but that is another story I am not fond of currently.

I got the 3rd edition and 4th. The 4th edition is more geared towards a more current kernel (6.6.x) and other toolchain options.

Because, well…

Security!

Seth

P.S. I have a lot of notes so far and I plan on building around beagleboard.org boards again for this kernel. Who knows? I may find a new way and then a way to keep up with current stuff too, e.g. kernels, u-boot, security, and etc.

5

Yes, buildroot is much easier to work with.

As far as yocto goes, I got tired of all the monkey business that is going on with it, still use it but just for an Intel big box project and that too is getting old. Debian, for me is the go-to OS or Ubuntu, just depends and the hardware.

6

Right. I agree that porting other OS types to boards with systemd now in play is not as smart.

Heck, I have not even tried other OS types to the beagleboard family of boards yet. I may not know what I am saying.

Like, um, the other popular Distros available via Linux kernels has not been a direct hit for me.

I only once had a desktop for another Distro outside of Ubuntu or Debian.

It was the SUSE. For whatever reason, I disengaged SUSE at the time and moved back to Debian.

It seemed easier to port cross-compiled source to/from boards running similar OS types. I could be wrong again.

I mean…

  1. Is using Debian Bookworm on x86_64 any different than trying to port a cross-compiled version of source from Debian Bookworm ARM64 to an aarch64 beagleboard.org board unit?
  2. I had doubts. I always thought for running specifics, one needs to have the correct type(s).

For instance, if I wanted to port from/to aarch64, an ARM64 “desktop” machine would be needed.

I am not even sure of that any longer with how far Linux has merged into building around systemd and cross-compilation tools.

Seth

P.S. For instance, I booted a BBB with Buildroot. It had networking, not wifi, a small rootfs, and some ability to update via compiling once more. I did NOT use an arm64 “desktop” but used an Intel x86_64 “desktop” to build the appliance OS. It worked for the most part. I just always believed that when one would want to build for arm64, an arm64 arch is needed.