Missing PicoCOM3 documentation

Documentations are available on our "regular" homepage: <!-- m --><a class="postlink" href="http://www.fs-net.de/cms/index.php?id=downloads">http://www.fs-net.de/cms/index.php?id=downloads</a><!-- m -->

Unfortunately there is still no full-blown documentation available as PDF. It's one of our hottest topics on our TODO list, but it's not done yet.

The document you are referring to is an outdated version of some overall information of how a BuildRoot based system works and how our own Linux now differs from the versions on boards that were ported by emlix. The remaining part just lists the packages that were available in our V0.2 release.

Here is the part of the document that may still be of some relevance.

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Linux on PicoMOD6 (2.6.28)

With the PicoMOD6 Linux we are following a slightly different approach than the previous Linux boards that were supported by emlix. The part with the boot loader combination NBoot/U-Boot, the Linux kernel itself and the cross compiler toolchain remains the same. That means we provide the boot loaders, an adapted kernel (incl. sources) that contains all the device drivers required to access the hardware that is provided by the PicoMOD6, and we provide a cross compiler toolchain that can be used to recompile the kernel, boot loader and other software.

But regarding the available tools and software (the so-called target file system), we differ from emlix. emlix used to provide a set of programs, where the size of the set (i.e. the number of available programs) depended on whether you purchased the professional version or only used the evaluation version. With the PicoMOD6, we are now switching to the Buildroot environment instead (see <!-- m --><a class="postlink" href="http://buildroot.net/">http://buildroot.net/</a><!-- m -->).

Buildroot provides a framework for cross compiling a large set of programs, ranging from small command line tools like gzip or all the busybox commands up to large system software packages like X-Windows, DirectFB, CUPS, python or Qt, and, last not least, the C/C++ library itself. Using a menuconfig system similar to the one in the Linux kernel, the packages can be included or excluded from the target file system. After this package selection is done, make is started. This automatically downloads the required source packages from their original websites, configures them, compiles them and generates a target file system image for the PicoMOD6 module that includes all these packages. This image can either be mounted via NFS from a PC (useful during development) or can directly be downloaded to the board and stored into flash memory to get a stand-alone system.

There are several advantages when using Buildroot.

• There are quite a lot of software packages available in Buildroot.
• Each software package can be individually included into the final image or not. If you activate a package, Buildroot checks all the dependencies and automatically activates all packages that are
  required as prerequisites for the package you selected.
• The modifications required to cross compile the packages are already handled by Buildroot, i.e. Buildroot provides a set of patches that are required to cross compile these packages and use them on an embedded system. Therefore all included software packages should run right out of the box without any further modifications.
• Buildroot releases a new version about every two or three months. This means that the included software packages are updated to their newest version and even new packages become available. For the PicoMOD6 this means that you don't have to bother when a new version of some package will come out. Just wait for the next Buildroot release, copy your configuration file, start a new make, and you'll automatically get the newest version of each package into your target file system.
• The community behind Buildroot is rather active. That means problems with available packages will be solved rather quickly and also the build process will get smoother and smoother with each release. Even if this project is still rather young, it is already very impressive. We assume that it will evolve into a quasi standard for embedded systems.
• Even if we at F&S will provide binary images of some selected target file system configurations (for example a standard, a minimal and a rather extensive set of tools), we can put a far larger number of configuration files on our server. Just copy the configuration file to your Buildroot directory and run make, and then you'll have exactly the same target file system as we provided. For example this can be used as basis for your own target. Just take the configuration from our server that is as similar to your needs as possible, add or remove a few settings, run make, and you are done.

Therefore by using this Buildroot system, we are far more flexible and far more up-to-date as when managing an own set of software packages in a kind of own Linux distribution. But this also means it is not easily possible to generate a list what we exactly do provide with our Linux system. We basically provide everything that Buildroot provides. The only thing is, that we may not actually have tested all packages (and all package combinations) yet. But as already said, most of the packages should work right out of the box.