Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
When VirtualBox is used, the
host
environment is the environment that is running
VirtualBox (for example, Mac OS X). The
guest
operating system will be Ubuntu
(recommended) or Debian. This leaves us with three environments in total:
Host
: Or native, running VirtualBox (for example, Windows)
Guest/build
: Ubuntu/Debian development environment
within VirtualBox
Target
: The destination execution environment (your
Raspberry Pi)
Planning Your Cross-Development Environment
The main consideration at this point is normally disk space. If you are using VirtualBox,
limited memory can be another factor. If you are using Linux or Mac OS X, check your
mounted disks for available space (or Windows tools as appropriate):
$ df −k
Filesystem 1024−blocks Used Available Capacity Mounted on
/dev/disk0s2 731734976 154168416 577310560 22% /
devfs 186 186 0 100% /dev
map -hosts 0 0 0 100% /net
map auto_home 0 0 0 100% /home
map -static 0 0 0 100% /Volumes/oth
$
In the preceding example output, we see that the root file system has plenty of space.
But your file system may be laid out differently. Symlinks can be used when necessary to
graft a larger disk area onto your home directory.
If you're using VirtualBox, create virtual disks with enough space for the Linux
operating system and your cross-compiler environment. You may want to put your Linux
software on one virtual disk with a minimum size of about 8-10 GB (allow it to grow larger).
Allow a minimum of 10 GB for your cross-compiler environment (and allow it to
grow). 9 GB is just barely large enough to host the cross-compiler tools and allow you to
compile a Hello World type of program. But you must also factor in additional space for
the Raspberry Linux kernel, its include files, and all other third-party libraries that you
might need to build with (better still, a copy of the Raspberry Pi's root file system).
Within your development Ubuntu/Debian build environment, make sure your
cross-compiler and build area are using the disk area that has available space. It is easy to
glibly create a directory someplace convenient and find out later that the space that you
thought you were going to use wasn't available.
