04 Buildroot

As mentioned, my first buildroot download was less than successful. This was more than partially my fault as I set about downloading the buildroot package before reading the entire buildroot wiki page, and some supplementary articles, all of which mentioned that the latest version of buildroot (which is downloaded by default if a revision is not specified) may not be stable. Great.
Since it was mentioned that running the makefile supplied with buildroot takes rather a long time, I killed the latest version in its tracks, and set about downloading the version corresponding to the Gumstix system's version - I figure that, to begin anyway, I might as well try and use the given version and only upgrade if it's needed.

This package seems to have not downloaded properly, probably due to me not cleaning out the folder of half-built files before running the new makefile, so I cleared out everything and started afresh.
Keeping with the buildroot wiki, I did the following in order:

Step 0:
svn co -r 1161 http://svn.gumstix.com/gumstix-buildroot/trunk gumstix-buildroot

1161 being the buildroot version currently on the Gumstix. Then it was just a case of running the makefile.

Step 1:
cd gumstix-buildroot
make defconfig
make

and that was that. Granted, the final make took several hours, but it's all automated, so I left it running overnight.

Since I'm not planning on replacing the file system - not yet anyway - I went straight to the programming wiki page, and whipped up a c "hello world" to cross-compile. I copied this sample makefile, which seems a bit confusing and will need some deciphering, and compiled my program. A small scp later, and our Gumstix system was greeting the world.