New Quirky layer in OpenEmbedded

Having lots of fun. Recently posted about getting started with Yocto/OpenEmbedded:
http://bkhome.org/news/201704/part-2-libreoffice-compiled-in-oe.html

The Yocto books from Amazon arrived a few days ago, and I have had my nose down. Complicated, but making progress.

I decided to use OpenEmbedded from git as the basis for building packages for Quirky, not Yocto.

I have created a new layer, named 'meta-quirky', and so far it builds a basic X11 system with development tools.

Kernel also. I have just now looked at how to substitute my own '.config' file, will give that a go.

I will add more packages later. But very carefully, as want to build a very lean-and-mean distro.

Currently, just compiling packages, which are then imported into woofQ. However, in theory, OE could do the whole thing, build an image file ready to be written to a flash stick.
Down the track, might aim to achieve this, if I can master OE sufficiently.

Then, I could provide a single tarball, that someone can download, then run just a couple of commands and it builds the entire Quirky (or Puppy) image file. All it would need is a compatible host system, such as Quirky 8.1.6 or one of the ubuntu-pups or debian-pups (with some small fixes and extra pkgs installed).

The biggest problem right now is how long a build takes. Even a minimal build takes 12 hours, a big one (LibreOffice etc.) more like 24 hours.
That's because it is running one core only on my laptop.
Maybe I should invest in a fast PC/laptop, maybe i5 or i7 CPU, 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD ....don't want to spend the money right now though...

Tags: oe