Thursday, October 2, 2008

Gumstix - restarting buildroot

So, I was tinkering around with make menuconfig under the gumstix linux kernel and I seemed to have screwed up. make started failing with errors indicating that the arch type wasn't defined. I'm really not sure what happened, but if I have to hazard a guess I think I enabled certain features which are i386 only. But, I wasn't able to recover from that situation. A few things now that I'm wiser after the incident:

I should've been using a versioning system (for heaven's sake I already used svn for check-out this code... )
I should keep a manual log of what changes I implement as well

anyways, I got around this by re-downloading my entire build-root. I also realized I had to do another step which I should've (but couldn't really have) done the first time I downloaded build-root: ensure that I download a version of build-root that really works.

Since I had a previous version already flashed and running on my gumstix, I did the following to extract this info:

[root@gumstix ~]# cat /etc/gumstix-release
DISTRIB_ID='gumstix'
DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION=''
DISTRIB_RELEASE='1614'
DISTRIB_CODENAME=''
BUILD_DATE='Tue Sep 30 19:04:19 PDT 2008'
BUILD_HOSTNAME='myHostName'

svn co -r1614 http://svn.gumstix.com/gumstix-buildroot/trunk gumstix-buildroot

by itself didn't seem to work initially... all modified files remained as it is (understandably and thankfully so)

I simply mv-ed my existing gumstix folder and ran the command again. It finished really quickly!

cd ~/gumstix
mv gumstix-buildroot gumstix-buildroot-screwedup

then I did:

cd ~/gumstix/gumstix-buildroo
make defconfig
make

so far so good.. it's going!

Next steps (to be implemented one at a time)

1. enable gdb support
2. enable usb (gadget) support
3. enable other device / driver support

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