From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 14478 invoked by alias); 6 Nov 2003 00:31:42 -0000 Mailing-List: contact ecos-discuss-help@sources.redhat.com; run by ezmlm Precedence: bulk List-Subscribe: List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: , Sender: ecos-discuss-owner@sources.redhat.com Received: (qmail 14468 invoked from network); 6 Nov 2003 00:31:40 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO smtp.mailbox.co.uk) (195.82.125.32) by sources.redhat.com with SMTP; 6 Nov 2003 00:31:40 -0000 Received: from [212.18.250.85] (helo=[212.18.250.85]) by smtp.mailbox.co.uk with esmtp (Exim 3.36 #1) id 1AHY3o-0004AS-00; Thu, 06 Nov 2003 00:31:40 +0000 From: Peter Lister Reply-To: prl@peterlister.co.uk To: ecos-discuss Cc: prl@peterlister.co.uk Content-Type: text/plain Organization: Message-Id: <1068078698.5094.351.camel@localhost.localdomain> Mime-Version: 1.0 Date: Thu, 06 Nov 2003 00:31:00 -0000 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Subject: [ECOS] Newbie feedback and braindump. X-SW-Source: 2003-11/txt/msg00059.txt.bz2 Hello, I've recently been playing with eCos - it seems like a fascinating project with quite some potential. I have not yet run eCos on a really embedded box (I'm thinking about getting an openbrick, based on the Geode chipset),so I though I'd play with the Linux Synthetic setup. I swear I followed the advice on the web pages. Really. Don't tell me to RTFM - I did, many times. But still it took me 4 days to get as far as successfully running "Hello World" on Linux... First, I tried to use the 2.0 kit as suggested by the web pages but this just didn't work. I tried the GUI configtool (BTW, please give it an eCos specific name, it's very confusing otherwise) and frankly I don't think it made the job any easier. The sequence of events is NOT intuitive to someone learning how the components work. Then I found http://www.mlbassoc.com/examples/ and used the command line ecosconfig against the latest CVS version. Hooray - finally I saw "Hello World". The first problem, I perceive, is that it is NOT obvious to a newbie that the "Linux Synthetic" platform is a thing distinct from the "PC" platform. I assumed (not unreasonably, I think) that the default template was the right one; the templates are not are not organised by architecture, and so it is not obvious that the default i386 template is NOT suitable for the "Synthetic" target. I'm sure that this distinction is so stunningly obvious to many of you who know eCos well, so that you can't imagine why I'm so stupid. Well I saw the instruction to select a template, and the default seemed OK, so it never ocurred to me - had I seen the available choices in the i386 domain by default, I might have noticed that there was another choice. Building the ecosynth target is also far from obvious. Once I'd actually realised that, no, it is NOT built as part of the target, I read http://ecos.sourceware.org/docs-2.0/ref/synth-install.html, which advised me to cd "somewhere suitable" and use a directory synth_build. So I did. Well I had an ecos directory and I'd created a config call "synth" - obviously, this was a build for the synthetic target - and the configtool had created a directory synth_build... It tooks me HOURS to realise that the idea was to create a DIFFERENT directory from the one I'd used for the rest of the eCos build, and that the name synth_build was just a coincidence. You cannot tell a newbie just to cd "somewhere suitable" - I do not yet know what "suitable" *means* yet. The advice from the web pages is for newcomers to build with the GUI. I disagree. The GUI does not make the process clearer - in fact it obscures what is going on. It may make Windows users feel happier (I don't know), but I just found it confusing. Trying to configure the right thing (I realised I wasn't getting the synthetic target, but couldn't work out why), I was getting information about build problems and conflict information with macro names - but nothing to link this to the package names and configuration options in the main window (compare to the Linux kernel "make xconfig" which always gives the actual macro names in the GUI). It's a very important part of the process of first using something like this that the initial process and constructing the first demo is easy; THEN one can start tweaking. The MLB Associates example came fairly close to this ideal, but the eCos web info has a great deal of verbage and screen shots to do the equivalent, and still doesn't work, as far as I'm concerned. I have no idea whether the 2.0 code will work if I try again from scratch, but I'm not that motivated to find out. I happen to be fairly motivated to investigate eCos, and I do know that it actually works, so I persevered, but blimey it was uphill work. It wouldn't be hard to make the ecos-install.tcl ask "would you like to build the Synthetic Linux demo" and run Hello World out of the packet, and as that seems likely to be a very common first proof-of-concept, it should eliminate many newbie questions. RPMs aren't hard to build; if Etherboot images can be built by www.rom-o-matic.net, RedBoot really shouldn't be any harder. -- Before posting, please read the FAQ: http://sources.redhat.com/fom/ecos and search the list archive: http://sources.redhat.com/ml/ecos-discuss