Hello All,
Just wondering if there would be any interest in a TS virtual machine
development environment. I have taken my personal time at home to work on a
VirtualBox image that features some common commands, examples, and development
packages for a free and easy, quick-start development solution. I believe it
would be a valuable resource to those without a development Linux box or to
those who would simply rather work from a virtual machine. The idea of putting
together a VirtualBox image came from many tech support calls and emails I
took the common ideas/questions the customers had and put them together in this
virtual machine. Ideas/questions such as:
"How do I image the SD card from Windows if Windows doesn't have the 'dd'
command?"
"How can I cross-compile a c program?"
"How can I cross-compile a kernel?"
"How can I develop a GTK+ GUI application?"
"What about a generic Linux command cheat sheet?"
Many of these solutions can be found scattered around on the embeddedarm.com
website and ftp server, but I brought them together on the VirtualBox image.
Some of the solutions can only exist on a Unix box (like the 'dd' example).
These customers may not have time to invest in obtaining another PC and loading
Linux onto it. They can sure save a lot of time by simply downloading two
packages: VirtualBox installer and the ts-ubuntu.vdi.bz2 image.
The virtual machine is Ubuntu 9.10 (guest additions installed) with many
development packages installed and many unnecessary packages removed. As it
stands, the .vdi VirtualBox machine is at 742M compressed and 3.3G
uncompressed. There is certainly some room for refinement here, but it depends
on the interest.
I chose Ubuntu 9.10 as the base because I want to offer the most user-friendly
and popular Linux distribution so that it is easy and quick for people to start
developing their products quickly with the smallest learning curve possible.
Ubuntu has been flaunted and deemed as such by the majority of the Linux
community. If implemented correctly, I could find a smaller distribution such
as DSL or Puppy Linux and set them up to be user friendly as well.
I chose VirtualBox because of it's user friendly interface, steady development,
powerful features, large community support base, and cross-platform host
support (Mac OSX, Linux, and Windows).
I have been documenting as I go along as well. This is the guide I put
together for setting up the VirtualBox machine:
http://oz.embeddedarm.com/~derek/VB_Tutorial/VirtualBox_Guide.html
DISCLAIMER: Technologic Systems doesn't have any plans to officially release a
virtual machine development environment. This is a personal project that I
enjoy working with. Again, this has all been done on my own time and is not
the work of Technologic Systems. If I were to provide this VirtualBox image,
it would be AS-IS with NO support other than what I have already provided. If
there is enough interest, I'll swing it by the boss-man and see if he thinks
this would be worthwhile.
What do you think? Good idea? Bad idea? Weaknesses? Strengths?
I do have the image ready to upload if you'd like to give it a whirl. I just
gotta figure out where I'm going to put it...
Best Regards,
Derek Hildreth
Embedded Systems Engineer
Technologic Systems
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