Development environment

Moblin is not a general purpose O/S nor is it intended to be the developer’s main workstation. Rather, it is an O/S composed of optimized components for product-specific run-time requirements.

To expedite and simplify development of new components for the Moblin distribution, the Moblin team made available a development environment, based on Virtual Machine concepts, that provides and achieves the following:

• Platform-simulated development environment
  Moblin platform-specific run-time images bundled in a virtual machine (currently KVM) allows you to run the binary run-time image of a certain platform on your standard and/or non-mobin development system as long as it has support for KVM. This prevents host contamination while providing Moblin dependencies and components for unit testing without hardware.
• Further, you can install, using MIC, Moblin’s development host-tools and use the VM as a development platform to code, compile, build, and test your components (non-kernel and h/w-dependent components) without host contamination, while maintaining build-time component level compatibility.
• Pure build tools
  Moblin maintains its own host tool-chain (compiler, dev libraries, make, etc.), which are completely self hosted and maintained, and provides the infrastructure to develop components for Moblin in a self-hosted and dependency-controlled build environment.

The platform simulated development environment is available as a feature of MIC where, once you have built an image for a supported platform by creating a MIC project then a target with all the fsets desired, MIC now has the option to produce, in addition to a Live-USB and an installable-USB image, a KVM VM of the run-time image, with a single click of a button.

The VM image can be launched directly from MIC, or by clicking the “Launch VM” button and you have all the necessary components on your workstation.