Can it be done? Is there a such thing as a compiler that runs under Windows that can target ARM on Linux?

The only reason I'm not compiling my own empeg kernels and such is that I don't want to install an entire version of Linux just to do the job. But if I could run a compiler executable under Windows, then upload the resulting files to the Empeg, then everything would be easy.

Is this a pipe dream?

PS: I am aware of VMware, but that's still installing an entire version of Linux inside VMware. I'm also aware that I could put an entire Debian ARM distro on the Empeg itself and compile there, but I upgrade it so often for alpha tests that I'd be re-doing the distro far to often for my tastes.

___________
Tony Fabris

but I upgrade it so often for alpha tests that I'd be re-doing the distro far to often for my tastes.

For what it's worth, I extracted Jim Pick's debian tarball to a directory on one of music partitions, chrooted to the new environment, and installed a few more packages that I needed. After booting the player, all I need to do is turn on the swap partition and chroot into the other environment, and I'm all set. No mucking up the root partition, and upgrades don't affect it.

As for development under windows - I really have no idea if it will work, but you could try building everything up like you would on a linux box. gcc for windows can be found here. You'll need all sorts of other stuff to go with it - Fortunately, it's all opensource. Unfortunately, you may have to compile it yourself .

Of course, NT has a POSIX subsystem installed by default, but I've never tried running POSIX apps under NT...

Not that it's much help (especially since I'm a NT sysadmin by trade, and only dabble in Linux and programming in general cause I have nothing better to do), but there's my 2 cents.


Bill B.
Mk.2 SN 080000183 - 38 GB / Green

Hmmm, OK so I am mildly confused as to why you would want to develop for a perfectly good OS on one of the worlds worst OSes. But, OS religion aside, it would take you a lot less time to just install linux on something than it would to setup a proper cross-compile environment under windows (particularly if you have to build up from scratch as BillB mentioned).

-Mike

For what it's worth, I extracted Jim Pick's debian tarball to a directory on one of music partitions, chrooted to the new environment, and installed a few more packages that I needed. After booting the player, all I need to do is turn on the swap partition and chroot into the other environment, and I'm all set. No mucking up the root partition, and upgrades don't affect it.

...and there's something deeply satisfying in typing 'apt-get dist-upgrade' on a digital music player (especially one with an NFS mounted root filesystem)... :-)

--
Mike Crowe
I may not be speaking on behalf of empeg above :-)

I installed the CygWin tool distribution on a Win NT 4 box and can cross-compile to a Motorola target (for my EFI hobby); in theory, I should also be able to build a Debian distribution for an ARM target. Not tried it, though.

It's not that much work to do, but you do need familiarity with the tools and a pretty strong background in the GNU C/C++ compiler. If you are looking for some info on the compiler itself, look at:

Tom Swan's GNU C++ for Linux (Que Books)

- which talks about the use and operation of the compiler itself in isolation from programming and system specific issues. You will need other programming texts for info on programming with Linux as the OS; there are thousands of books on this. As for info on the CygWin toolset - there used to be good info on their website.

One of the few remaining Mk1 owners... #00015

I'm also aware that I could put an entire Debian ARM distro on the Empeg itself and compile there, but I upgrade it so often for alpha tests that I'd be re-doing the distro far to often for my tastes.

You can put it on a NFS server somewhere and mount it from the empeg, this way you won't have to rebuild it when you upgrade the empeg. I have a RedHat system set up like this but it was very painful to bootstrap since I couldn't use any of the standard installers.

Anyway, I agree with the other replies in this thread - the easiest option by far is to install Linux on a desktop machine (provided you can spare a gig or two of diskspace).

Regards,
Borislav

As schofield said, cybwin is what you want. It's a full gcc unix environment ported to windows. From there you can cross compile to other targets.

But installing linux would be easier and probably quicker.

You can put it on a NFS server somewhere and mount it from the empeg, this way you won't have to rebuild it when you upgrade the empeg. That is an excellent idea if Tony wants to compile directly on the empeg. Is there any NFS support in NT? That way you wouldn't be wasting drive space on the empeg and would not have to deal with setting up a cross-compile environment. You may even be able to use something like sharity to mount a windows SMB share on the empeg. -Mike