Building for the NGW100 Part 2: An easier way

So on my last post about cross-compiling programs for the NGW100, I went through the trouble of setting up a virtual environment to be able to use the provided build environment. I realized today that that is largely unnecessary, and it would be much easier to just extract the files from the provided packages and write a little wrapper script to set up the environment to build from that location. Its much easier, and much faster (as long as you have a system that can execute x86 binaries natively):

To begin with, we need to extract the build environment and other goodies from the provided package files. This is necessary because they are not compatible with the more recent release of Ubuntu that I am using.

First, get the BSP (board support package) ISO from Atmel at http://www.atmel.com/dyn/products/tools_card.asp?tool_id=4102. Either burn it to a CD or mount it using a loopback interface.

Next, extract these files. Change to a directory where you want to put them, and issue this string of commands:

for file in /media/cdrom/devel/linux/ubuntu/dapper/*.deb
do
    dpkg-deb -x $file ./
done

This should result in the creation of a new directory ./usr, with all of the files in it. At this point, there are a few choices; this tree could be copied verbatim into the system /usr directory, and everything would probably just work. However, I would like to keep my build environment separate from the rest of my system, so I wrote a little script to add this tree to my user environment, which can be invoked when I need to compile for avr. Here is the script, to be placed in the directory containing the usr directory above (I call the script setup_env.sh):

#!/bin/bash
 
DIR=`pwd`
 
export PATH=$DIR/usr/bin/:$PATH
export C_INCLUDE_PATH=$DIR/usr/include
export CPLUS_INCLUDE_PATH=$DIR/usr/include
 
export LIBRARY_PATH=$DIR/usr/lib
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$DIR/usr/lib

These options may or may not be correct, but they seem to work for me so far. To invoke the script, use the . operator to apply the environment variables to the current shell:

. setup_env.sh

As a test, construct a simple program and compile it for the ngw100:

echo -e '#include <stdio.h> \n int main(){ printf("hello!\\n"); return 0; }' > test.c
avr32-linux-gcc test.c -o test

This should produce an executable named test, which can be copied over to the NGW100 and run. At this point, everything should be good to go!