This is mostly aimed at Mark Lord, but this aint a BBS for nothing!

Great work on the Hijack kernel! It rocks! It also leads me to believe that you know a little something about Linux, and since you supplied the "precompiled toolchain", if you don't mind too much I have a few questions...

First, a little about where who I am so you can gauge your answers: I have been developing software on the PC platform for some years on the MS side. I have written everything from DOS and Windows user apps to device drivers for the WIN 98/NT/2000 platform, I even wrote a custom multitasking kernel for the PC platform before windows was usable. I design custom embedded hardware, distributed systems, cards for the PC bus, etc. I write firmware in C and native assembly for various microprocessors, microcontrollers, and various DSPs. I believe that Linux is "the wave of the, well, now and future" in terms of embedded devices. I actually originally bought my empeg because it was cheaper than the StrongARM development kit (not to mention much cooler and more useful). So, now I am beginning to launch into Linux, but I have a few questions . . .

I have RedHat 7.2 installed on my PC. It works great.

I have downloaded your "precompiled toolchain" and unpacked it.

Q1: What is the deal with this ".tar.gz" thing. Why is everything Linux packed down with two different tools? I have been using PKZIP and later WinZIP on the PC side for years, as well as others (LZH, etc), and every one will handle the directory structure as well as the compression.

Q2: When I unpacked the "precompiled toolchain", it expanded into "/usr/local/armtools-empeg" and the readme says:

export PATH="/usr/local/armtools-empeg/bin:$PATH"

But be careful: don't include this on your PATH when building non-Empeg stuff,
because the cc1 executable will get confused.

but all of the tools in the bin directory are named like "arm-empeg-linux-gcc". However there is a directory in there that looks like "/usr/local/armtools-empeg/arm-empeg-linux" under which there is another "bin" directory with executables like "gcc". I got nowhere with

export PATH="/usr/local/armtools-empeg/bin:$PATH"

but

export PATH="/usr/local/armtools-empeg/arm-empeg-linux/bin:$PATH"

seems to work better. So the question is what's up here? I must be conceptually missing something here. And what is cc1? (Maybe that's what I'm missing?)

Q3: I found a couple of example apps on the "Unofficial developers site" (www.empeg.mars.org). But I could not get a good compile. Specifically I tried pngtest-0.1-empeg-arm-linux.tar.gz

It says that you need to obtain "libpng" and "zlib". I found those, downloaded them, and after pointing my path to "/usr/local/armtools-empeg/arm-empeg-linux/bin" I was able to build both of those libraries apparently with the arm gcc (as the build was successful, but the x86 test app stopped working) but I still get a truck load of errors when attempting to build the "pngtest" example.
So, the question is, can you provide a simple sample app that can be built with the cross compiler so that I can tell that I have it installed and working properly (or al least point me to one)? Is there already something of that nature in the "precompiled toolchain" that I am just missing?


Thanks,

Steve