Developement under Linux

[tod]

You could try doing a poll here on the forum to find out who's interested. I for one would be very interested. I own a Mac and have just started using Eclipse on it. I may never develop for the NB on it but I think your article would teach me a lot about the parts of the toolchain I have been ignoring for a long time.

[rsg]

I don't own a Mac, but I am trying to migrate all my work to Linux. So far, the only things left are Delphi (which is, of course, Windows-specific ) and Netburner Eclipse. So I am quite interested...

Cheers,
-Bob

[pbreed]

We had a Linux release very early on before eclipse etc....
We had dozens of people ask for it and sold ..... 1 copy.

So the compcode , comphtml and clinetool tools were all made to compile under either windows or Linux.

We have not exercised this feature for a very long time (9 years?)

The one caution I would give is that we do modify the standard libgloss and newlib libraries to fix some thread sharing issues
with malloc and floating point printf.

If someone want to volunteer to build the linux tools/libs I'll send a CD or big zip file with our library source.
We build the compiler tool chain on linux, so we can share the pieces of that as well.

[limaxray]

Has anyone taken this offer? I'd be interested in trying to help out building the tools and libraries in Linux if no one else is already working on it.

My company is moving everything over to Linux - from workstations to embedded systems - and the Netburner tools are one of the few tools left that require maintaining Windows VMs. I haven't had much time to play with moving the NB tools over to Linux, but if there were a community effort, I would be more than glad to help out where I can.

[thomastaranowski]

limaxray, I was planning to follow up and try to setup a linux build environment, but haven't heard back from Paul.

[ckoehler]

Interesting thread!
I am on OSX also, and would be fine with using a Windows VM to develop for Netburner boards. Sounds like that's already possible. I guess you guys use USB to serial converters?

It would be even nicer to have it OSX native, or at least in a Linux VM to keep it somewhat self-contained and get rid of Windows altogether.

So, rock on guys! I like where this is going.

Christoph

[blondguy]

Interesting thread!
I am on OSX also, and would be fine with using a Windows VM to develop for Netburner boards. Sounds like that's already possible. I guess you guys use USB to serial converters?

It would be even nicer to have it OSX native, or at least in a Linux VM to keep it somewhat self-contained and get rid of Windows altogether.

Christoph

You don't need a separate USB/serial converter, you can hook directly into the USB uart bridge on the dev boards. With a little bit of magic you can even use Terminal as your serial comm device.

I have put together a native OSX tool set based on gcc 4.4.3 & binutils 2.20. I have been using it for about a month now and have not had to fire up the vm. I use xcode with an external makefile target. Unfortunately, the debugging is not graphical. Xcode's version of remote debugging uses ssh.

I plan to write up what I've got on the NetBurner wiki sometime soon. Most of what I have done should work on Linux except for my port of autoupdate which uses Obj-C. However, if gnustep is installed on the linux box it should work.



pbreed -

I would love to get the source you speak of. I had to make some tweaks here and there to rebuilt the NB libs native (mostly around re-entrantcy issues and clashes which unistd.h). Also, it appears that NB held back the debug source to ethernet.cpp, is this available? In order to use the included ethernet.od object file, I had to make some tweaks to the linker script. It would be nice to have the source and rebuilt the object file since this is necc to use network debugging with gdb.

Also, what is the status of the flash file system code? Available or license restricted?

I would really like to look at the 'official' code and incorporate those changes into what I have done so far before I go writing up anything on the howto wiki.

I have only ported the NetBurner compcode and autoupdate tools. I haven't had the need for anything else. So there is opportunity for someone else out there to do the other NB tools. However, I am more than happy to share what I have done in setting up the actual build tools.

[ckoehler]

Are there any news on making this available somehow? Windows is making me hurt myself.

Thanks!

Christoph

[Cheetah]

I thought I'd provide curious linuxers with an update to this ...

I've just tried getting the NNDK 2.6.0 beta working in wine.

I'm using Debian testing, which currently has wine 1.4.1.
The NNDK installer went fine.
The JRE installer went fine (I tried jre 6 and 7).

NBEclipse gets past the "where would you like your workspace" prompt, and then no further, it just hangs, no errors or crashes, but no splash screen either.

The command line build, however, seems to work (wineconsole cmd.exe, C:\nburn\setenv.bat, cd wherever, make). I've only tried building a couple examples so far, but so far so good.

** edit

I tried again with wine 1.5.6 and NNDK 2.5.3, and while I got an error about NBFind not being able to bind its socket, NBEclipse appears to have started fine.

I ran through the project creation wizard, and that mostly went OK ... it created the new project and built it.

Unfortunately I get workspace save errors, so after restarting NBEclipse, it remembers the window layout, but it has forgotten that I added the project.

[tod]

If linux is similar to windows, in your workspace directory you should have a .metadata folder. Inside that will be .log file. That may give you a clue as to what failed when it tried to boot.