Florian Boor

OpenEmbedded training - part one

Motivation

The idea is to get a short step-by-step introduction into some important tasks for your daily work with OpenEmbedded. It does not focus on replacing the manual, but it should be guide for people who want to become productive with OE fast.

OpenEmbedded is a complex tool and it is able to serve some quite complex purposes. We have reached a state where documentation and tools are good enough so that people can get started with OE. But the first experience of most of OE's users is usually bad and the flexibility OE offers makes it a pain for someone who tries to get started. The idea of this document is to offer a short training for people who want to get introduced into OE without getting lost in a pile of magic commands they do not have an idea what they are actually doing.

Why OpenEmbedded?

This can be answered in a single sentence: Because it is extremely powerful. But let's elaborate this a little bit: The main reason should be that is has a very active user and developer community (usually several checkins each hour for several years now). All core components are well tested and known to work for multiple architectures. OE is very flexible - you can use it for building installable binary packages, toolchains, flashable file systems and manage multiple configurations for all of these easily. e.g. it is easy to deploy the same software on multiple incompatible devices or different sets of software for the same device.