Has Anyone Built A Live CD for Development?

[lerman]

Installing the development environment can be a pain. Installing openocd requires libusb and libfdti which requires... Installing gcc requires proper paths to be set up, etc.

It would be neat if someone build a Live CD with an Ubuntu (or whatever) distribution containing everything needed so that we could do stuff out of the box. The live CD I'm familiar with (EMC2) lets you run directly from the cd, or do an install. I'd be happy with the requirement to do an install, but either way would work just fine.

Ken

[karurosu]

I am not exactly sure what you mean by "development environment"? As I understand you want a complete linux environment?

[lerman]

Yup. The whole thing. Add a machine, stir and go. 

It would simplify things if a developer could just boot with the CD and have everything ready to go. Connect the target to the USB, connect an ethernet, and you would be all set.

Ideally, the arm kernel would be setup with the common modules. Just select the ones you want, type make, etc.

The beauty of a live CD is that it can be booted on most any machine and be ready to go in a few minutes.

Ken

[karurosu]

what you say is that you want to boot the sheeva from a cdrom?
Right now you can do it from a SD, a USB or TFTP (network), so I see no reason for a live CD, what would be nice is to have a premade USB/SD image to just "flash" it into the drive and use it, not that I'd use it, I think this is being discussed somewhere in the forum.

[Rabeeh Khoury]

I can't understand the question / request here too.

Anyhow, openocd can be statically compiled that it wouldn't be dependent on libraries. See the Alpha-6 installer and it's openocd binaries as an example.

[mindbender]

openocd is for flashing via jtag from a separate machine.

so i think lerman means a pre-configured livecd/liveusbstick that boots to a linux distro with preconfigured openocd + crosscompile enviroment(codesourcery toolchain?) + tools(terminal for serial - modifying uboot environment, tftp - loading kernel/initrd from LAN, nfs - booting to nfsroot ==> all tools most likely are provided in any modern distro....but some scripts could make it easier to instant setup this things for recovery/development)

so essentially its something like a Recovery & Development Distro. i guess ubuntu was just mentioned as an example.

[lerman]

Yes. Mindbender has it just right. Everything should be configured and ready to go. The cross compiler should be in the right place, the path set correctly, etc.

[jplug]

I created a ubuntu 8.04 livecd to get the sheevainstaller to work, it has the correct usb serial/jtag drivers for the sheevaplug , openocd, cu , and putty. If any one has a place to host it, I'd be happy to share.

[mindbender]

we could host it at nas-central.org.

just register in the bug tracker and file an issue
http://www.nas-central.org/services

then you will be granted ftp access.

[jplug]

I could not get nas-central to send me the activation e-mail but it is available for download here.
http://www.filedropper.com/ubuntu-8042-desktop-i386-sheevaplug

[mindbender]

downloading. its ok for you if i host it on nas-central.org?

[jplug]

I have no problem with you hosting it.

[lerman]

I'm having trouble with the file. I ran an md5sum on it and got:
f5cf081d4361ea32230449226efebec6  ubuntu-8.04.2-desktop-i386-sheevaplug.iso

When I check the actual iso, I find that three files don't match the internal checksums. Two of them are manifest files and should not matter. The third is ./casper/filesystem.squashfs. I'm sure that does matter.

I was unable to burn a cdrom of the iso file. I suspect that it is just a hair too big. I burned it onto a USB key instead.

Questions:
1 -- Is the md5sum for the overall file correct?
2 -- Has anyone actually successfully booted from this disk?

Thanks for all your efforts.

Regards,

Ken

[birdman]

I'm having trouble with the file. I ran an md5sum on it and got:
f5cf081d4361ea32230449226efebec6  ubuntu-8.04.2-desktop-i386-sheevaplug.iso

Hmmmm....I get:
3121280126852919f4372aab24e754ba  ubuntu-8.04.2-desktop-i386-sheevaplug.iso
-rw-r--r-- 1 me... mine.. 735832064 Jul 21 22:12 ubuntu-8.04.2-desktop-i386-sheevaplug.iso

When I check the actual iso, I find that three files don't match the internal checksums. Two of them are manifest files and should not matter.

Indeed, but if you diff them on the CD you'll find that they do not differ, so why would they have diifferent md5sums (which md5sum.txt claims)?

The third is ./casper/filesystem.squashfs. I'm sure that does matter.

Given that the other files in casper/ are wrongly listed in md5sum.txt, I'd assume that it is the list which is wrong.

I was unable to burn a cdrom of the iso file. I suspect that it is just a hair too big. I burned it onto a USB key instead.
...
2 -- Has anyone actually successfully booted from this disk?

Sort of.  I'd actually burnt it to a DVD (I needed an iso image for a test and knew where this one was, so used it.  Just tried it for you and it certainly booted (I'm now looking at a heron on my laptop).

[lerman]

I downloaded it again, got the right md5sum this time, and installed just fine.

Thanks,

Ken