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I did this once before for a project at UC Berkeley, called the ESCHER effort (see http://chess.eecs.berkeley.edu/escher). Much of my experience came from that page.

Now, I'm installing a crosscompiler on (k)ubuntu gutsy, which is running in vmware on my Mac OS X laptop.

Find out what the gumstix is running

Install minicom

 sudo port install minicom

Using a USB-Serial dongle, I connect to the serial port on the gumstix. I configured it through minicom to be 115200 8N1. After logging in as root:gumstix, I catted a file to see what version of the buildroot it was using.

 # cat /etc/gumstix-release                                                      
 DISTRIB_ID='gumstix'                                                            
 DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION=''                                                          
 DISTRIB_RELEASE='1161'                                                          
 DISTRIB_CODENAME=''                                                             
 BUILD_DATE='Mon Nov 6 11:20:28 PST 2006'                                        
 BUILD_HOSTNAME='azazel.hughes-family.org'                                       
 # 

Check out the buildroot by this version

So we need to check out build -r 1161. Easy enough. On my linux 'machine', I do the following

 cd ~ && cd svn/ && 
 svn export -r 1161 http://svn.gumstix.com/gumstix-buildroot/trunk gumstix-buildroot-1161

Installing a C++ compiler

If you want a C++ compiler, you have to either run the interactive version of make config, or you can apply this patch to .defconfig. I created the patch using diff -u (oldcfgfile) (newcfgfile) > gumstix-libstdcpp.patch, so you wouldn't have to edit the file.

Open and edit this file, copying the above contents into it. After creating this patch file, apply it like so:

 patch -i gumstix-libstdcpp.patch .defconfig

Running the installation

The first time I ran this, it turns out I needed bison, flex, and gettext and texinfo. So, on my VMWare machine, run this before running any of the makes below, to avoid having to do maintenance during the install:

 sudo apt-get install bison flex gettext texinfo zlib1g-dev

Copy and paste this line, to avoid messing up "L" and "1". The purpose of adding the "1161" at the end is to ensure that I know which version this is. Also, note that the export command, not co is used, to avoid needlessly copying a bunch of .svn files to my computer, which just clutter it up. If I need to update the repository, I have more things to worry about than this.

 cd gumstix-buildroot-1161 && make defconfig && make

During this process, a bunch of files are downloaded (including a 40MB version of the linux kernel, and 13MB of binutils that never seems to download fast at all), and the kernel is configured. You may need to provide some help during the configuration process, though most of the params are correct by default...

Bug if you don't install texinfo

Then, something really troubling happened:

 WARNING: `makeinfo' is missing on your system.  You should only need it if
         you modified a `.texi' or `.texinfo' file, or any other file
         indirectly affecting the aspect of the manual.  The spurious
         call might also be the consequence of using a buggy `make' (AIX,
         DU, IRIX).  You might want to install the `Texinfo' package or
         the `GNU make' package.  Grab either from any GNU archive site.

Wow, this is really annoying. I do have makeinfo installed, a simple call to which confirms it. Also, after installing texinfo with apt-get, I still got the error. SO, on http://docwiki.gumstix.org/Buildroot#Troubleshooting, there is a note about this problem. They recommend

 rm -rf toolchain_build_arm_nofpu
 make

After installing texinfo. This worked for me, since I am using makeinfo v.4.8. If you have version 4.10 or 'higher', you are in trouble since the comparison script to see if 4.10 > 4.4 fails, since 4.1 < 4.4 (remember you these programs bit you in your freshman year?). Refer to the buildroot page if you have this bug.

This reminds me that guy from Office Space??:

 MICHAEL
 Ok! Ok! I must have, I must have put a decimal point in the wrong place 
 or something. S***. I always do that. I always mess up some mundane 
 detail.

The bottom line is that by installing texinfo above, you can avoid all of this.

No c++ compiler installed

Well, this finally all completed, but in the end, I don't have a C++ development chain---just a regular C development chain. Hm. I looked up what I did on the ESCHER project to fix this:

 make BR2_INSTALL_LIBSTDCPP=true

Ah, I guess that would have been good to know a while back.

Install of C++ fails

 compr_zlib.c:39:18: error: zlib.h: No such file or directory

This means you need to have installed zlib on your LOCAL (building) machine. Why this is, I have no idea...but, there it is. To do this,

 sudo apt-get install zlibc

It was added to the list above to prevent this error.

Running an example

Now that your crosscompile toolchain exists, let's use it! The best way to use it is to take advantage of something like autotools to do our crosscompilation setup for us. I have created an autotools "Hello World" program for the ECE473-573 class I taught at UA in Spring 2008.

 wget http://www.ece.arizona.edu/~sprinkjm/teaching/ece473/uploads/Main/ece473-573-hw01-question1-1.0.tar.gz

Now, extract it and go into the directory

 tar xzf ece473-573-hw01-question1-1.0.tar.gz && cd ece473-573-hw01-question1-1.0 &&
 mkdir build-arm-linux && cd build-arm-linux

We have to setup our crosscompile toolchain in the right place. If you can't remember where you installed it, try

 slocate arm-linux-gcc

If nothing comes up, you need to update your slocate

 sudo slocate -u

Now, take that path (maybe it resembles the below) and add it to your ~/.bashrc

 export BASECROSS=/home/compile1/svn/gumstix-buildroot-1161/build_arm_nofpu/staging_dir
 export PATH=${PATH}:${BASECROSS}/bin

With this in hand, we build!

 ../configure --host=arm-linux && make

Now, we have our file---let's download it to the gumstix and bask in the glow of our professionalism. We are victorious. There is nothing in our way now, baby!

I configured my gumstix to be at 192.168.0.2, and just compiled this stuff on compile1.csl.ece.arizona.edu, and I'm running on my mac. No worries, scp is the bomb.

 scp compile1@compile1:/tmp/ece473-573-hw01-question1-1.0/build-arm-linux/src/main root@192.168.0.2:~