Playing/Learning -- QEMU (for ARM), Angstrom Linux (or Debian)

My ultimate goal is to do some programming for the Ang开发者_如何学JAVAstrom Linux (or Debian or other Linux distros), on QEMU emulating ARM processor board s.a. Versatile board. I am happy to experiement, but if someone has attempted something similar, and can give little guidance, it might hasten progress.

My understanding of the steps needed are:- 1. Build QEMU from source (although I am not sure if a prebuilt binary won't do). I found QEMuManager on Windows (XP being my Desktop OS on which I intend to run QEMU). 2. Install ARM tool chain (e.g. Yagarto / GNU-ARM for Cygwin?) 3. Download an Angstrom Linux tarball and build it 4. Create a QEMU image with Angstrom Linux.

However I am missing on the details, as I believe there are choices to be made at each of those steps.

IMHO you should use a linux distribution as host machine for your QEmu instead of trying to compile/install all the QEmu stuff in a cygwin based system, it will remove some futur headaches. You can use a VMWare player with an ubuntu image.

I used to play with this tutorial for Debian on QEMU.

The beagleboard, hawkboard, open-rd sites all tend to lead to their distros being built on qemu (arm), and from there there is no reason why you cannot just continue to keep running on the simulation instead of heading for hardware.

This is an example of how to do it with ubuntu. https://wiki.edubuntu.org/ARM/RootfsFromScratch

Yes it is also possible to cross compile everything as well, I would start with wiki pages that hand hold you through all of the steps. Or as with the hawkboard or beagleboard get a pre-built binary (kernel and root file system) and just boot it and run on that environment and not mess with building everything.