This article by Movial Technical Manager Veli Mankinen introduces a GPL-licensed toolset for integrating, cross-compiling, and testing Linux software. Scratchbox provides a sandbox build environment that assures that the intended versions of libraries, headers, and other such files are used during the build.

Mankinen asserts that most of the higher-level software built using GNU Autotools does not cross-compile nicely in their as-is form. Scratchbox solves this problem by allowing the small test programs (used by the configure script to test for availability of features in the environment) to run transparently either using an emulator or through “CPU-Transparency” on an actual target device.

In practice, software configuration and building using Scratchbox is quite identical to how it's done for the desktop, Mankinen says, making it possible to bring regular developers to the embedded Linux projects.

Learn more about Scratchbox in Mankinen's introductory article.

Read article introducing Scratchbox

 
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