Building OpenNao

OpenNao is the name of the Linux distribution that comes with the Nao. It is based on OpenEmbedded. With the basic configuration files, a few patches and some OpenEmbedded magic you can start building your own packages for the Nao. Currently, the kernel cannot easily be built as some crucial configuration files are missing from the file that Aldebaran provided. OpenEmbedded is a cross compilation environment specifically designed to allow for easy building of Linux distributions on top.

Setting up OpenEmbedded

We assume that you have root access on the machine where you work, or that your administrator created two directories, /opt/oe and /opt/naoqi that you have write permission for.

On most systems I found that a few required packages are missing. These are monotone, help2man, and texi2html. On Fedora you can type yum install monotone help2man texi2html to install these packages. Then you need the files  oe-opennao-20080624.tar.bz2 and  oe-opennao-mod-20080805.tar.bz2. The script below will download them for you. Then do:

cd /opt
wget http://robocup.rwth-aachen.de/files/media_nao/oe-opennao-20080624.tar.bz2
wget http://robocup.rwth-aachen.de/files/media_nao/oe-opennao-mod-20080805.tar.bz2
tar xfj oe-opennao-20080624.tar.bz2
cd oe
sed -i -e 's|python|/usr/bin/python|' bitbake/bin/bitbake
wget http://oe.linuxtogo.org/snapshots/OE.mtn.bz2
bunzip2 OE.mtn.bz2
mv org.openembedded.dev/ bak.org.openembedded.dev/
# Possibly required for monotone >= 0.40, try pull first, if that fails, do the migrate
mtn --db=OE.mtn db migrate
mtn --db=OE.mtn pull monotone.openembedded.org org.openembedded.dev
mtn --db=OE.mtn checkout --branch=org.openembedded.dev
tar xfj ../oe-opennao-mod-20080805.tar.bz2
source setenv.sh
bitbake sqlite3
bitbake avahi
bitbake file
bitbake gcc
bitbake readline
bitbake openssl
bitbake libxml++
bitbake file
bitbake lua
bitbake tolua++
bitbake libpng

If bitbake fails, you may have to add the following line to your build/conf/local.conf:

PREFERRED_PROVIDERS = "virtual/i486-linux-libc-for-gcc:glibc virtual/i486-linux-gcc-intermediate:gcc-cross-intermediate"

Using your local build

After building files you can find ipkgs appropriate for installing on the robot in /opt/oe/tmp/deploy/ipk/geode/. The locally installed environment is in /opt/oe/tmp/staging/i486-linux/. It is used during linking of Fawkes when cross-compiling.