Getting ready for Moblin development

Submitted by Elliot Smith, updated on 1 Mar 2010 - 0 comments

This section covers the basic steps you need to set up a Moblin development environment. First, you need two Linux environments. These two environments can either be on one machine (physical or virtual), or on two different machines (one for each environment). In this guide, we use one machine for each environment:

  1. Development environment - a Linux development machine
    where you'll be doing your coding, compilation, and packaging.
    We recommend using Linux machine for this.
  2. Deployment environment - a machine running Moblin
    You'll deploy your project to this machine for testing and debugging.
    We recommend using a physical machine (such as a netbook) running Moblin for this.
The following subsections cover in more detail what needs to be available in each environment.

Development environment

A Linux machine running an up-to-date Linux distribution is suitable for Moblin development. The supported operating systems and versions are:

  • Fedora Core 12
  • Ubuntu 9.10

Others may work, but the SDK tools are not guaranteed to work with them.

You then need to follow these steps to make sure you have the right tools in your environment:

  1. Install the standard set of Linux development tools, as described in Installing Linux development tools.
  2. Install the Moblin SDK components. This enables you to set up tools for use in Moblin development, a toolchain containing the required versions of the Moblin libraries, and an IDE with Moblin plugin. See below for more details.

Note that while it is possible to develop for Moblin on Windows/Mac/other *nix derivatives, this is not documented at present.

Installing the Moblin SDK components

The Moblin SDK components provide assistance at each stage of Moblin application development. They comprise:

  • Moblin toolchain This is a directory which contains the Moblin operating system, including header files, libraries, and package information. It allows you to run Moblin applications on your workstation, build and debug code in an editor of your choice, and do remote debugging.
    Install them using the Moblin toolchain instructions.
  • Linux Project Generator This graphical application generates GNU autotools-enabled projects..
    Install it using the Linux Project Generator instructions.
  • Moblin Package Creator This tool can be used to generate an RPM and/or DEB package from your project, suitable for installing via the Moblin Application Installer. It has both command line and graphical interfaces.
    Install them using the Moblin Package Creator instructions.
  • Plugins for two development environments are available for building Moblin applications:

Once these steps are complete, your machine is ready to support Moblin application development.

Deployment environment

At the moment, seeing your application running in a Moblin environment requires you to have a physical machine with Moblin installed. Once your application has been built, you deploy to this machine to run it.

Support for running Moblin inside an emulator is intended for future versions of the SDK.

Follow these instructions to install a Moblin image on your netbook.

Once you've installed the Moblin image, you'll need to setup your machine for remote access as described below.

Setting up a Moblin machine for remote access

The SDK plugins provide a mechanism for deploying an application direct to the filesystem of a remote machine. For this to work, you need to install openssh-server and rsync on the Moblin machine. From a command line, run:

$ sudo yum install openssh-server
$ sudo yum install rsync

This should automatically start an ssh server on the Moblin machine; it will also be started each time the machine boots.

You'll also need to configure your Moblin machine to allow access from other hosts. From a command line, run:

$ xhost +