any changes ? nope

It's been a while since I wrote on this blog. I started experimenting with NGW100 1,5 year ago. Meanwhile I did a lot of other targets as you can read on my blogs. But I wanted to retake a brand new buildroot with an updated kernel and give it shot. I can use the NGW in my project to serve as a TCP/IP to I2C converter so it was worth to try. But I knew that it's hell working with linux buildroots. I had hoped tough it had changed a bit in the good direction.

So I downloaded the buildroot from the atmel site 2.3.0 RC1 with kernel 2.6.27. I did my tests a year ago with kernel 2.6.23. I noticed very quickly that nothing has changed. The same old problems appeared like missing packages and broken compilings. As a test I said to my self let me try with a buildroot for ARM9 and see if this gives any differences. Also that one was real shit to compile.

My conclusion is that the open source on itself is quit a good philosophy but the compile and build environments really suck. Dependencies all over the place and if you don't have one right you lose. As long as people out there are not changing that complex process I'm not intended to go any further with it. There is need to standardize this process so it could run on any linux distribution. Also the interface of making the BSP and kernels must be greatly enhanced anbd simplified. At this moment there are far too many different distributions which makes it only worse.

So people who love to play with embedded systems stuck with some good old C and maybe a good RTOS to run with. But stay a way from the ugly linux buildroots.

I guess I have to found some other system to do that job ;-)