First experiences with Olimex

[Kafanti]

Hello,

I have been trying to cross compile Qt5.5 for Olimex A10Lime. It has been two weeks with unsuccessful tries. And since then I have learned so much .

The problem I have faced first was my cross compiling toolchains gcc and EGLIBC versions was not compatible with the official Olimex image has on it. So every time that I have cross compile Qt it has failed on linking because it can not find the shared libraries. (here is the link where i have downloaded that image: https://www.olimex.com/wiki/A10-OLinuXino-LIME)

Official Olimex image has gcc with 4.6 and EGLIBC with 2.13. Even gcc<=4.6 don't have hard float support.. gcc start to support C++11 and hard float with 4.7. And the all pre-build cross toolchains with gcc-4.7 has EGLIBC with 2.15. So i had to upgrade my EGLIBC and gcc. Upgrading gcc was not an issue, because wheezy has it but upgrading EGLIBC was not possible, so i had to get it from testing and after some point because of it is not stable, my system start to leak and some point it was not bootable anymore..

So i have tried to upgrade it to jessie from wheezy. But the transition failed because of some packages(which is udev) have not compatible with the kernel.

And finally i have tried Debian installer. It was perfect. Installation succeeded but without display support. Because it was headless..

At this point I have two options. First one is to compile Qt without C++11 support or I guess I might try to build my own image which will cost me atleast two months..

But I am really in curios that why Olimex still distributing that image? I guess that would be a perfect if Olimex might focus a bit more on after sales support. I really like the hardware of Olimex but it would be perfect if they keep their support.

I would be glad to just find an image with Mali binaries and kernel are perfectly working with a current version of linux distributions. So i might be start to developing. It is really frustrating that you are not even able to develop because of you are not able to setup an updated environment.

Thank you,
Sina

[JohnS]

Are the other threads about Qt5 no help?

Why you think building your image would cost 2 months I cannot begin to guess.  A day, yes.

John

[Kafanti]

Well, actually the older threads helps a lot. I have done all my process according to those actually. But unfortunately my all tries have been ended with unsuccessfully because of the EGLIBC version that the image has (which is 2.13)(linking fails to shared libs).

On the other hand, I have never tried to compile a kernel before, and it looks like scary :S (because I don't have any prior UNIX/Linux exp). And also if I try it, I don't know if it would be worth since i need roots with EGLIBC>=2.15 and GCC>=4.7.

I guess those versions depends on the distros, and according to linux-sunxi -Note that old stable Sunxi kernels before 3.4.105 may be incompatible with Jessie because of systemd.*- I am not sure if it is possible to boot that version of kernel is able to boot-up on A10Lime.

Thank you,
Sina

*http://linux-sunxi.org/Qt5_For_Mali_Binaries

[JohnS]

It seems you want to do something a bit unusual ... but you also don't want to do ordinary things like build kernels....

(systemd or not systemd... it's a whole new issue.)

John

[Kafanti]

Well actually you are right about, people need to do ordinary things to do unusual things. But developing Qt application.. is that really unusual?

I have just bought raspberry pi and it took 2-3 hours to cross-compile it.. Seems like not unusual thing. At least for Raspberry pi.

[JohnS]

Same process works for AW chips.

John