Initial installation

Installation went smoothly enough. Before installing, RED-Builder insists that you enter one of those obnoxious long serial numbers like the ones Microsoft customers must enter. You will find this serial number on the inside back cover of your manual, though you'd never guess this from the documentation.

The bulk of the installation is in the REDBuilder RPM file, which places most of its files in /usr/share/apps/redbuilder and /usr/lib/redbuilder. The documentation indicates that Python, wxGTK, and wxPython are installed if necessary, but I found that I had to install wxGTK and wxPython manually — Python was already present on my Red Hat system. An uninstallation procedure is provided.

I found RED-Builder's user interface to be one of the more well-designed and intuitive of the toolkits covered in this series. You start by choosing the architecture. X86, StrongArm, MIPS, and PowerPC are supported — SuperH is notable for its absence.

Board support strategy

For this series I've been using three x86-based EBX form-factor single-board computers (SBCs) as test platforms for the toolkits. These are the Winsystems EBC-TXPlus, the Jumptec/Adastra VNS-786L, and the Ampro Little Board/P5x. RED-Builder comes with board support packages (BSPs) for about a dozen x86-based SBCs, not including any of the boards I have.

To address this, RED-Builder has one of the best thought out and best documented methods for preparing your own BSPs among the toolkits I've reviewed. The basic units understood by the user interface are REDSonic Kernel Archives (RKAs) and REDSonic Kernel Modules (RKMs).

An RKA is basically a kernel for a particular architecture, along with all drivers that are likely to be used for that architecture. These are combined, along with a modules.dep file defining driver dependencies, and some files defining the user interface names to be assigned to each module, into a tarball and given the “.rka” extension. No special tools are provided for generating an RKA, but the process is fairly simple and well documented; and the RKAs provided with RED-Builder serve as useful templates. In fact, you should seldom need to create an RKA, as those provided with RED-Builder should be adequate for most purposes.

Once an appropriate RKA is available for your architecture, you create from it a REDSonic Kernel Module (RKM) to handle your specific platform. Like RKAs, RKMs are simple tarfiles, but contain only the kernel and modules for your platform.

RED-Builder provides the Platform Editor to create RKMs. This is a GUI-based program in which you specify the RKA on which the platform will be based, provide it a name and some kernel and driver information; Platform Editor then creates the kernel and filesystem images for you. I found Platform Editor to be admirably easy to use.

• Part 1: First impressions
  
• Part 2: Initial installation
  
• Part 3: Creating a project
  
• Part 4: Flexibility and extensibility

 
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