Using OpenEmbedded for maemo development

As one of the driver behind the Jalimo project, I decided to enhance my blogging activity to give you an idea what we are doing. This one is about our toolchain!

We started Jalimo with the goal to bring free Java to cool linux devices and maintain it over the time. Since we are interested in multiple target platforms (especially maemo and openmoko ATM) the only way for us could be to have one build engine which is capable of producing packages for all the targets. The best tool I know for this is OpenEmbedded. As we started, OpenEmbedded lacked support for maemo, as well as proper Java support. We added both (done by Robert Schuster). So now we are able to build our Jalimo packages for maemo4 with the same command as our packages for OpenMoko: bitbake. The most parts are already committed to the OpenEmbedded upstream, but we are still maintaining an overlay in our svn.

For those of you, who know Mamona, I should explain the difference: Mamona is a complete OpenEmbedded based distribution for the n8xx which tries to align with maemo over the time. In contrast to that, the chinook-compat distribution we are using is far from being a complete distribution (e.g. no kernel), but produces packages which are compatible to the original IT OS images.

Beside our Jalimo related packages, this should be an easy way to build most of the ~5000 OpenEmbedded package for maemo. For us, this is one step to unify the development. When I’m looking at the upcoming fragmentation on linux mobile platforms, I hope, we get some more steps done.