Qt for Embedded Linux

Getting the VC21RB1 working with the VC I2C example was a nice step to make. I can now get back to looking at the VC21MM1.
With the COGLinux kernel in the VCMX212 flash ROM, a few people have been asking on the VC google group whether anyone has ported some form of Linux framebuffer based GUIs across. Some suggestiongs have been Qt, Tiny-X, DirectFB. It's taken me a few weeks to check out the various window managers. Finally liking the look of Qt for Embedded Linux.
One deciding factor was a group post about someone that had ported this to another i.MX21 based device called the Chumby, blog link. I've spent the last week going through this, the Qt web site, and getting it all setup in Cygwin (and lately Ubuntu).
I've managed to get the tslib to work on the VCMX212/VC21MM1 :) But the Qt Embedded install has been quite challenging. It took me a while to determine why a cross platform compile of Qt wasn't working under Cygwin. The configure script uses uname to sort out certain paths through the configure scripts, and breaks the cross platform compile!! :( With Wubi installing Ubutu on the development laptop I'm now looking at cross compiling via that and Cygwin.
With the limited time I can spend on home-brew development, this could take (probably) a couple of months to sort out. But so far it's coming along nicely.. Watch this space for updates :) Eventually I'll start filling out the Wiki over on my Google Code page that accompanies this blog with the steps required to get Qt working on the VC21MM1.

Wubi and Ubuntu

When I grabbed a cheap Thinkpad T42 laptop off of Ebay last year I was really pleased. It came with a fresh install of WinXP which allowed me to cleanly partition the single HDD with Partition Magic. With the intention to put Fedora onto that new partition, and do all the Robot development under Linux.
In all the Computer Games companies I've worked for it has always been Windows based development (using Cygwin for HW vendor tool chains). A linux distro is something I had toyed with occasionally, but knew that for embedded work I should really jump ship and develop wholesale under Linux. It was quite annoying to find that the DVD drive on the laptop was flaky :( Anyway, alot of existing Virtual COG'ers, including the guys over at Virtual Cogs, use a Windows/Cygwin setup for VC development. I could have perservered with Fedora (mounting the ISO in Windows to install from, etc.). But didn't require anything else that Cygwin had, so moved on.
This week I came across something really special, namely Wubi :) It cleverly installs Ubuntu onto an existing NTFS/FAT partition. The only thing it changes is to modify the WinXP boot loader to GRUB, to allow for dual booting into XP and Ubuntu. Tried this out, and it works fantastically!! My dev laptop now has Ubuntu!!! :)