Author Topic: Development Virtual Machine  (Read 4805 times)

batman52 (OP)

  • Posts: 111
Development Virtual Machine
« on: November 14, 2009, 08:15:08 pm »
First the bad news: the upgrade to karmic of my machine resulted in an epic disaster, so that atm i can't code anything.

The good news (at least for the others, hopefully) is that in order to prevent repeating such kind of things, i plan to set up a development virtual machine, that i would share with our community. Therefore, before starting I wanted to ask to you developers what do you think about. I wanted use as start system, the latest release of dpup, aka the woof-generated puppy linux distro compatible with debian/ubuntu.

http://dpup.org/

I see several advantages of dpup over other solutions:
-extremely lightweight: could run with 128Mb of (virtual) ram, just about 100Mb for the system image
-graphical environment (i am still not that acquainted to vim/emacs/nano and prefer if I can the common keyboard shortcuts)
-install of applications/dev packages as easy as it would be in other debian distros
-extremely portable and easy to share: puppy saves all modifies to the system into a bunch of .sfs files, so that in order to share a whole system, one has to actually share just those 2/3 files, further reducing the hosting space needed over the internet. Moreover, putting these files on the root directory of one of your hd, you can easily run the development system natively on your pc with a puppy-cdrom boot.

I would include the following,

Toolchains:
-dingux toolchain
-linux toolchain for original fw + elf2app.py http://boards.dingoonity.org/dingoo-development/minimal-sdk-for-linux/

Packages:
-bash terminal (which package?)
-gcc
-libgcc++-dev
-SDL-dev
-SDL_ttf-dev
-SDL_image-dev
-SDL_mixer-dev
-python
update:
-manpages-dev
-ipkg-utils

Moreover, a text editor with sysntax highlighting is already present (Geany); anyway white-ish backgrounds hurt badly my eyes, so when I can i set dark backgrounds (it looks like with geany i can't). I was fine with gedit, but it depends on the whole gnome... so there's no point in using it. In my windows machine at work i use notepad++ that works very good, but isn't available for linux. I know of scite that looks similar, but i still didn't understand whether i can change color schemes of not, but if i could, i'd go for it.

About the VM host, i still haven't decided between VirtualBox (www.virtualbox.org) and qemu (www.qemu.org). Both of them are portable and could be used by mac/windows users too. VirtualBox would be easier (embedded graphical front end) and full featured (usb drives support, for instance), but maybe these features are not THAT needed. Qemu would be good, but the last time i used it, i had problems in setting a shared folder with the host system, that is mandatory imo.

Suggestions, feedback and comments are welcome.








« Last Edit: December 25, 2009, 04:01:27 pm by batman52 »
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abhoriel

  • Posts: 188
Re: Developement Virtual Machine
« Reply #1 on: November 14, 2009, 09:13:23 pm »
I would recommend adding "manpages-dev" or whatever it is called on that distro, to provide man pages for the C library, etc.
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quadomatic

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Re: Developement Virtual Machine
« Reply #2 on: November 15, 2009, 05:47:34 pm »
I'm not sure why you would use dpup instead of Puppy Linux. Then, I'm not sure if puppylinux is the best choice, since I'm not sure how terribly expandable it is...but then again how much is really necessary.

I would recommend VirtualBox, as it's real easy to set up on any OS.
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remax

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Re: Developement Virtual Machine
« Reply #3 on: November 15, 2009, 08:28:31 pm »
Quote from: quadomatic on November 15, 2009, 05:47:34 pm
I would recommend VirtualBox, as it's real easy to set up on any OS.

Same for me
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abhoriel

  • Posts: 188
Re: Developement Virtual Machine
« Reply #4 on: November 15, 2009, 09:44:17 pm »
you could add qemu-mipsel, if people want to test mips assembly for example

EDIT: and maybe ipkg, as there is talk about using ipkg for dingux package management.
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batman52 (OP)

  • Posts: 111
Re: Developement Virtual Machine
« Reply #5 on: November 16, 2009, 08:11:57 am »
Quote from: quadomatic on November 15, 2009, 05:47:34 pm
I'm not sure why you would use dpup instead of Puppy Linux. Then, I'm not sure if puppylinux is the best choice, since I'm not sure how terribly expandable it is...but then again how much is really necessary.

I would recommend VirtualBox, as it's real easy to set up on any OS.

The point in using dpup is that you could install .deb files from the latest debian release, so that it should be very easily expanadable.
Anyway t all makes sense just as long as I can keep the development environment 'small' (it would make no sense for instance a full debian vm (2Gb hd)).

The bad news is that during the weekend i have tried the two latest realease of dpup and none of them work good neither with virtualbox, nor qemu (graphic issues that make unusable the desktop).

In the past I had tried the upup (ubuntu-karmic-based) released from Barry Kauler (the author of puppy) and it worked good, but he stated that he doesn't plan to support that version, so that now i am fallen into a no-go.

What do you think about a chroot-ed environment? I would really like to have everyting needed to developement into a single folder that doesn't affect my system.

Quote
you could add qemu-mipsel, if people want to test mips assembly for example
EDIT: and maybe ipkg, as there is talk about using ipkg for dingux package management.

the quemu-mipsel is a good idea... an even better idea could be jz-qemu
http://code.google.com/p/jz-hacking/wiki/qemujz
an quemu-mips emulator for the ingenic jz SoCs.
For sure I would add the ipkg-utils.
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schanall

  • Posts: 139
Re: Developement Virtual Machine
« Reply #6 on: November 24, 2009, 12:13:07 pm »
Have you tried Crunchbang? It's small and really fast (ubuntu alternate install plus some features like openbox)...Works fine in VB!
« Last Edit: November 25, 2009, 08:20:34 am by schanall »
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Nickeng

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Re: Developement Virtual Machine
« Reply #7 on: November 24, 2009, 01:45:06 pm »
I would go with VirtualBox - not had any issues with that so far for my work.
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batman52 (OP)

  • Posts: 111
Re: Developement Virtual Machine
« Reply #8 on: November 30, 2009, 08:09:29 am »
I think I somewhat gave up.

Maybe I'll try again to work on compiling (pseudo-)natively with qemu both in user-space mode and system mode.
With qemu-jz http://code.google.com/p/jz-hacking/wiki/qemujz one could think to write a dingoo emulator for pc, but I'm not up to the task. That's it.
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stuckie

  • Posts: 3
Re: Developement Virtual Machine
« Reply #9 on: December 24, 2009, 02:24:31 am »
I seem to have picked this idea up a bit and have run with it.

I've had a look at PuppyLinux and I'm not quite fond of it, to be honest... it's a bit too boxed in to what it set out to do itself, rather than being able to hack away at it, and I didn't manage to get very far with it.
I've also looked at DSL - Damn Small Linux - and had a good long fiddle with it. I got quite far with setting it up too; however, it's running a 2.4 kernel so I'd either need to upgrade the kernel, or hope that running the buildroot script for the Dingux toolchain would create a compatible toolchain ( and create yet another version to maintain! )
DSL-N does have a 2.6 kernel, but I didn't get very far with it, unfortunately.. and both it and DSL seem a bit unmaintained these days.

So now I'm fiddling with both Knoppix and Morphix.
Morphix I've used before for a project a few years back, so I know what I'm doing with it - of sorts, they have changed a few things.
And most of these Live CD/Mini Distros are built from hacking Knoppix to bits, so I've been having a look at doing exactly that as well.

Still just messing with stuff at the moment, but hoping to end up with a modular live cd type thing, so that the toolchains can be replaceable modules without having to remaster the entire disc, along with some persistent home stuff..
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batman52 (OP)

  • Posts: 111
Re: Developement Virtual Machine
« Reply #10 on: December 25, 2009, 01:24:27 am »
Quote from: stuckie on December 24, 2009, 02:24:31 am
So now I'm fiddling with both Knoppix and Morphix.
Morphix I've used before for a project a few years back, so I know what I'm doing with it - of sorts, they have changed a few things.
And most of these Live CD/Mini Distros are built from hacking Knoppix to bits, so I've been having a look at doing exactly that as well.

I 'kinda' gave up, since i am currently using my brand new(=karmic) ubuntu box, anyway the modular approach in puppy is very strong: modifications saved on stand alone files are somewhat embedded in the system.

I remember slax also having the modular approach you talked about, but managing dependancies by hand, gets you crazy...

keep us updated!
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