Getting Started with EMAC Embedded Linux Development

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Application programming for EMAC Embedded Linux can be made relatively simple by using the following guide.

Getting Started

Following the list of articles presented here, in order, will provide you with a good foundation for building your custom embedded application.

Background Information About EMAC Products

Getting To Know Linux

Getting Your Linux Development System Up And Running

There are two paths you may take for this step

The LDC - Linux Development Computer

A popular option for this is to use the EMAC LDC - the EMAC Linux Development Computer. There are two variants on this option, as follows:

  1. The Hardware LDC: This is a desktop computer with EMAC's customized Linux distribution preinstalled with the full EMAC SDK installed and ready to run. This is the most painless method of getting started, especially for those new to Linux and/or developing software under Linux. This is the most preferable system to use for development.
  2. The LDC Virtual Machine: This is a virtual machine image which can be used in all popular virtual machine manager applications, such as VMWare[1] and VirtualBox. This, like the Hardware LDC, has EMAC's customized Linux distribution preinstalled with the full EMAC SDK installed and ready to run. This option works well, but is not as painless as the Hardware LDC option because not all virtual machine software has well developed support for serial ports. Serial ports are used in embedded development work to provide a method to connect to the hardware which is always available, no matter the state of the firmware currently present on the embedded machine.

If this is the method you (or your company) has chosen, your system should be already configured for development. Please skip to the Getting Familiar with Eclipse section.

Customer Installed EMAC SDK Packages On Customer's Existing Linux Computer

EMAC provides SDK packages which can be installed by customers on their own Linux machines. This is the most difficult method of getting started, but is often preferred by customers who are already highly skilled with Linux.

Should this be the method you (or your company) has chosen, please use the Getting Started With Software Development For EMAC Machines track below.

Getting Started With Software Development For EMAC Machines

Getting Familiar with Eclipse

These articles will help you get started with Eclipse. If you've elected to use some other editor or IDE for your development work, you may wish to skip this step. However, if you do skip this step, getting the build system working with your IDE will be beyond the scope of the EMAC documentation and will be unsupported. Using the shell based build system will, however, still work as documented.

Compiling and Running Some Software

Working With Bootloaders and OS images

Bootloaders provide the magic glue between the hardware (or the BIOS, on PC compatible systems) and the operating system. The bootloader is the piece of software which points the processor at the operating system image and kicks off the booting process. The bootloader can also be used to load new firmware onto machines, and perform some other tasks.

For systems which run their firmware from Compact Flash (or similar media), this section also provides instruction on how to load firmware images onto suck media.

If you need to load your own firmware images (or reload EMAC provided ones), customize the boot process or customize your firmware, you will need to read this section.

Old Bootloader

If you have a machine which uses the older RedBoot bootloader, these articles will give you the information you need to work with them:

Customizing Linux Kernels and Filesystem Images

This section provides documentation on advanced tasks with embedded Linux; namely, custom Linux OS kernel image building and firmware image customization.

Programming EMAC OE Machines

Here are some articles you may need for doing embedded development work with EMAC embedded machines.

Getting Support

Quick Reference

EMAC provides a quick reference guide as a "cheatsheet" to assist with the initial learning curve. Once full familiarity with the development environment is established, this quick reference will likely no longer be needed.


  1. ↑ VMWare is a trademark of VMWare, incorporated
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