Information for Developers

'I'm a developer, is there any technical info available from the PLi® team?

Welcome and tell your developer friends about us

Yes and welcome aboard! If you have specific question, you can use our PLi® Third Party Development forum to ask it. You will find we are most accommodating.

This page is about software development using OpenEmbedded-core. If you're looking for the text that used to be on the this page, it's now called developer-information-old.

Create your own build

See also this forum post on setting up a development environment: http://openpli.org/forums/topic/18806-openpli-quick-setup-ubuntudebian/

Basically, it boils down to this:

Run Linux. Most of us use the latest Ubuntu desktop release, I suggest you do the same, if you don't know what to pick.

Make sure the disk you use for the OE tree supports symbolic links, and you use at least git v1.8.0.

Install prerequisite packages, as described here: http://www.openembedded.org/wiki/OEandYourDistro

For Ubuntu, that's:

 sudo apt-get install sed wget cvs subversion git-core \
  coreutils unzip texi2html texinfo docbook-utils \
  gawk python-pysqlite2 diffstat help2man make gcc build-essential g++ \
  desktop-file-utils chrpath default-jre gettext zip libssl-dev

For CentOS, that's:

 sudo yum install gawk make wget tar bzip2 gzip python unzip perl patch \
    diffutils diffstat git cpp gcc gcc-c++ glibc-devel texinfo chrpath socat \
    openssl-devel zip python3 perl-Thread-Queue

Clone the openpli repository:

 git clone git@github.com:OpenPLi/openpli-oe-core.git

Setup the environment

 cd openpli-oe-core

Select the branch to build from

 git checkout develop

Install the required submodules

 git submodule update --init --recursive

Build your first image

 MACHINE=xxXXXX make image

To find the valid MACHINE=xxXXXX you can have a look at the .conf file in the meta-folder of the manufacturer MMMMM:

 cd meta-MMMMM/conf/machine
 ls

Note that by default, the develop branch of Enigma is used when you build an image, assuming that most "homebuild" users will want to build the latest development image.

If you want to build a release image, you need to specifcy the correct branch when building:

 cd openpli-oe-core
 git checkout release-7.2
 git submodule update --init --recursive
 ENIGMA2_BRANCH=release-7.2 MACHINE=xxXXXX make image

CentOS incompatibilities

Note that CentOS, even CentOS 7, comes with gcc 4, which is pretty old. It is advised to use DevToolsets to switch to 7 or 8:

 sudo yum install centos-release-scl devtoolset-7 devtoolset-8

which gives you the option to use versions 6, 7 and 8 as well. You can enable a version using "scl enable devtoolset-8".

When you want to compile OpenPLi-8+ (i.e. an image based on Yocto Zeus or higher), you need at least tar v1.28, but CentOS comes with 1.26, and bitbake refuses to run.

You can address this issue by (as root):

 cd /tmp
 wget https://rpmfind.net/linux/mageia/distrib/6/x86_64/media/core/release/tar-1.28-3.1.mga5.x86_64.rpm
 rpm2cpio tar-1.28-3.1.mga5.x86_64.rpm | cpio -idcmv
 cp /tmp/usr/bin/tar /usr/bin

Your own feed server

Once you've built your own image, you'd want to keep it up to date. You can just let the box update itself from your build PC using the GUI as if running a full distro. To do that, you first need to build the optional packages that go into the feed:

 cd openpli-oe-core
 MACHINE=xxXXXX make feed

Next, you need to install a webserver of some sort on the build PC, for example Apache2.

As an example, if you've installed apache on Ubuntu, it will share /var/www/html/ with the world. Create a feed subdirectory, and then add a symlink to the "ipk" folder of your build, for example:

 sudo mkdir /var/www/html/feed
 sudo ln -s ${HOME}/work/openpli-dev/build/tmp/deploy/ipk /var/www/html/feed/openpli-dev

To tell your box about this feed location, edit your local.conf or site.conf to contain the following lines:

 FEED_NAME = "openpli-dev"
 DISTRO_HOST = "mybuildpc.local"

After this, if you run a new image build, it will make the /etc/opkg/ files on the box point to your feed. After installing the built image on your box, you should be able to upgrade with opkg commands or the enigma2 GUI.

No real webserver handy?

If you don't have a real webserver, like Apache or Nginx, handy, there are some other options available to serve files via http.

Using PHP 5.4+:

 cd /var/www/html/feed
 php -S 0.0.0.0:80

Using Python 2.x:

 cd /var/www/html/feed
 python -m SimpleHTTPServer 80

Using Python 3.x:

 cd /var/www/html/feed
 python3 -m http.server 80

Using Ruby:

 cd /var/www/html/feed
 ruby -rwebrick -e'WEBrick::HTTPServer.new(:Port => 80, :DocumentRoot => Dir.pwd).start'

Using Ruby 1.9.2+:

 cd /var/www/html/feed
 ruby -run -ehttpd . -p80

Using Perl:

 cpan HTTP::Server::Brick # one-time install of perl dependency
 cd /var/www/html/feed
 perl -MHTTP::Server::Brick -e '$s=HTTP::Server::Brick->new(port=>80); $s->mount("/"=>{path=>"."}); $s->start'

Using Busybox HTTPd:

 cd /var/www/html/feed
 busybox httpd -f -p 80

NB: For ports below 1024, like the standard HTTP port 80 in the example above, you need root or administrator privileges.

OpenPLi - Git commands

Here is the link to some basic git commands.