Moblin

Poky's Moblin Support

Moblin brings a new environment to developers and there are many people in the community who want to experiment with this. The official way of building Moblin is targeted along the traditional desktop distribution approach which fits the needs of vendors who make up a large share of the user base, but especially in more embedded environments in the past OpenEmbedded style systems such as Poky are popular.

With this in mind we're pleased to announce the availability of metadata to build Moblin compliant images and develop Moblin software using Poky. It is intended for Poky to be a more experimental platform with innovation and experimentation being encouraged.

What it isn't!

Poky is not a replacement for the main Moblin distribution or its associated infrastructure and build system but instead should be seen as a a complement to it.

Differences to Moblin

Poky has different target users to Moblin itself so it makes sense that it will differ in how it does certain things to. Some of the main differences currently include:

Use of the light weight package manager opkg instead of yum+rpm. This underlines packages from one system are not intended to work with the other at least at this time. apt+deb can also be selected.
Uses latest git revisions of the Moblin UI packages - these are under active development so some issues can arise due to normal development flux. There is a known to be reasonable set of locked down versions and the option of letting the system use the changes direct from the SCM.
Single user with no traditional display manager.
Busybox style filesystem utilities for efficient disk footprint (although traditional utilities can be swapped in if desired).
The system is built using a cross compiler in sysroot mode. This means root privileges are not required to run builds, normal user development tools are available and a 64 bit host system can build for the 32 bit netbook targets.
The standard Poky IDE integration, SDKs, profiling and debugging tools are retained.

Trying it

The following commands are all that is needed to make a checkout and build a Poky Linux image that is Moblin compliant:

$ git clone git://git.pokylinux.org/poky.git
$ cd poky
$ source poky-init-build-env

conf/local.conf will be created with default settings, please check these and adjust as needed. You will need to set DISTRO=moblin and MACHINE=netbook. You can then run

$ bitbake moblin-image-netbook-live

and after the build completes an image will be generated in tmp/deploy/images/moblin-image-netbook-live-netbook.hddimg which can be transfered onto a USB memory card using dd and then live booted. This assumes the needed prerequisites are installed but if not, Poky will tell you which packages are missing.

Support

Bug reports on software built by Poky should initially go to the Poky bugzilla, not the Moblin one and the usual Poky support channels apply. The Poky mailing list is a suitable place to discuss Poky's Moblin support.