Good afternoon:
I am getting ready to teach a class using the Beaglebone Black for a set of college students. Last year we were caught in the short supply of the black boards, so I’m getting started abit earlier. However, I’m trying to figure out the best distro and cross compilation environment to use. Last year I used a Ubuntu distro with the Debian image and while things went OK, there were some quirks. Based on feedback, I was planning on switching to a Debian distro, and I started building a VM for them to use for this purpose. However, it seems as if Debian is no longer including the gcc-arm-Linux-gnueabihf package, and many of the sites have indicated this is now obsolete.
With that being the case, what is the current recommended cross compiler and platform for Beaglebone Black development?
Walt Schilling
http://derekmolloy.ie/beaglebone/setting-up-eclipse-on-the-beaglebone-for-c-development/
This is a fairly good guide, and I pretty much followed it exactly using Lubuntu 14.04. Maybe a few small changes here and there, most mostly due to armel versus armhf differences.
Lubuntu by the way, is exactly Ubuntu, but with a less graphics intensive Desktop ( LXDE instead of the “garbage” Ubuntu ships with - Unity ).
My own very rough text install notes . . .
So right now there's a binutils for armhf in debian jessie:
https://packages.debian.org/jessie/binutils-arm-linux-gnueabihf
However the "gcc" cross compiler is still stuck in sid:
https://packages.debian.org/sid/cpp-4.9-arm-linux-gnueabihf
So once that migrates to jessie (if it migrates) you'll have matching
armhf cross gcc/binutils/libs that can used to cross build projects
for the bbb running jessie.
Regards,
Do keep in mind there are several steps in my rough notes above that you may, may not want to do. disabling IPV6 for instance, which you may need on a college LAN. Also with this install I chose to install along side windows 7 ( dual boot ), you shounds like you’re not going to be doing this. A standard VM install would take the place of this.
A few hurdles may stand in your way, just as using USB devices having to be passed from the HOST OS to the virtual machine. Using the network gadget g_ether, this could prove to be a problem. I think I’ve done this once myself, but it was incredibly slow - Think ~4KB/s. Anyway, I never kept notes on how I achieved that . . .but there is information strewn all over the web about the subject.
Based on:
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=766626
This delay is expected.. So for users which to cross build packages,
running Debian Jessie on the desktop (amd64 only) and running debian
jessie on the bbb (1), they'll have matching gcc/lib/etc..
1: http://elinux.org/Beagleboard:BeagleBoneBlack_Debian#Jessie_Snapshot
Regards,
Robert:
Is this what you are using to build the kernel then?
Walt