Blog about working with Raspberry Pi for Windows users

Hey, I'm a windows developer with minimal Linux experience. That said, I'm pretty dead set on getting / using / developing for a Raspberry Pi. I'm using this blog space to start documenting my journey, for all the other folks who may be trying to do the same.

http://dracosoftware.blogspot.com/

Ok, so I have a general intro post up, and a post about getting the development VM set up. I have one more post which I'm hoping to finish later today about compiling your first program for the Raspberry Pi...

What other things can we DO at this point (other than salivate), since we don't have the hardware or a RasPi VM?

Ok, I got my Hello, World tutorial up. Yes, I know most of you know how to do this as second-nature, but part of the point here is to entice Win developers into the Linux space considering the attractiveness of the rPi as a tool to hack with.

http://dracosoftware.blogspot......world.html

[ukscone]

looks very nice. but the vm you are using has been deprecated and you should update to the new one though as it fixes a few buglets, quirks, uses a real distro tootfs and is a more pleasant experience.

http://russelldavis.org/2012/0.....t-vm-v0-2/

Those updates have been made.

Also with the help of ukscone and ShiftPlusOne, we have a more involved tutorial... How to build nSnake, which requires a precompiled library.

http://dracosoftware.blogspot......sting.html

For some reason I can't access your blog from work. It is categorised as "Adult/Mature Content" You can check the rating here : http://sitereview.bluecoat.com/

If you feel this is the wrong category you can get it re-reviewed.

Bluecoat is a third party company that we use for web filtering. Just thought you might be interested.

I'll check out your blog from home.

This is ridiculous, you add a filter to your internet stream and then you want people to conform to your rules? I can see the RaspberryPi forum admin chuckle behind his keyboard.

BTW I do understand you didn't add the filter and want to see the feed but it is your admin you should bother and not the RaspberryPi forum admin.

I think that message was for me... Yes, I see that the site has been categorized as a blog (correct) and as adult material (WTF?). I've submitted the form, we'll see what happens.

dracolytch said:

I think that message was for me… Yes, I see that the site has been categorized as a blog (correct) and as adult material (WTF?). I"ve submitted the form, we"ll see what happens.

It"s all those naked boards which might appear!  Plus Linux is just pure filth...

Hope you don"t mind, but will shove a link on the wiki under tutorials and guides, feel free to review it and change etc.

http://elinux.org/RaspberryPiB.....uides_List

I'm in a very similar position and have very little linux knowledge so I'll be keen to see where the blog takes us!

All the best.

Cool, thanks!

It's a little tricky, since I don't want to get too far into "How to Program". There's already lots of tutorials and resources on that... I'm trying to focus on what makes working with rPi unique.

Thanks for taking the time to create the how-to.  Question - do you have any idea how to transfer compiled binaries from the scratchbox2 VM to the SD card filesystem used by the Raspberry Pi?

It depends on what file system is the SD card using.

The best way should be by installing the add-ons for VirtualBox that let you use USB devices into the VM. That way you can add your card-reader to the VM and do a simple copy and paste.

This would help you avoid the Linux file system from the SD card.

The kernel boots from a FAT32 partition, but the rest of the OS is on another partition. This could be EXT3 and there are some tools for reading this type of partition within Windows. I am not sure if EXT4 is also available...

Another problem with Windows (noticed this in XP) is that it won't look for more than one partition on USB drives. I don't know if Microsoft has fixed this problem in newer versions of Windows.

Two things,

#1 The filter is filtering Blogspot.com, not specifically your blog. They don't care what the subdomain is, only what the primary domain is.

#2 Do you know if Mono will work on rPi? I know enough C# to run through the Mono environment, but I don't know C++ hardly at all. (I can follow it, but I don't know the libraries and such, so it's a pain to learn. For whatever reason, C++ code just doesn't stick with me T__T)

I like your blog. I'm now doing the VM instructions Ty!

Nice, I will be following your blog. Keep up the good work.

Caliber:
I don't have an rPi yet, so I have no idea if it'll be able to run things under mono. I also do a lot of c# development, so I'm hoping there will be a way to use my language of choice on the rPi!

With the ram limitations, I'm not super optimistic. We'll just have to wait and see.

C++ is a good language to start with here, since it's a high-performance language and it's fairly widespread. However, I do think there's also going to be support for Python and a few other languages from the get-go.

I figure once we actually get our hands on some rPi we'll see what kind of pointer-free garbage-collecting languages are available to us in a practical sense.

nehnie:

Let me know if you find any issues

i'm sure this blog will certainly come in handy for me.

i've been a full time windows c/c++ programmer – doing drivers and apps for 15+ years. i've also learned a bunch of other languages over this time.

i last played with linux (and one upon a time xenix) a long time ago. i just want rpi to fiddle with linux 'a bit' and learn some opengl stuff (which i could do on windows.. but this is 'of course' cooler)  – i may even end up with the opengl sharing source with a windows build (probably easier for me to debug some things..). i have a bunch of code, and app ideas for stuff i wrote many years ago i'd like to port to opengl.

so although my main boot of rpi will be into a dev environment i will have other cards ti play with xbmc and other cool homebrew stuff that turns up.

I think this is all a bit premature.

Your virtual machine might not perform the same way as the actual device, also it seems to be running Ubuntu.

Isn't the official distro Red Hat?

Good effort though.

[ukscone]

Jaseman said:

I think this is all a bit premature.

Your virtual machine might not perform the same way as the actual device, also it seems to be running Ubuntu.

Isn't the official distro Red Hat?

Good effort though.

The host OS inside the VM is Ubuntu (I hadn't got fedora16 working right as the host os for scratchbox2 until after I released the VM) BUT the seed rootfs used to build stuff inside scratchbox2 (the raspi emulation layer) is fedora13 for arm which is believed by some (me!) to be the distro of choice for the educational release of the raspi (maybe a later release but same diff)

the binaries built using the VM probably won't be perfect but they should run on the raspi and the VM is really aimed at helping people start to port s/w prior to having any hardware available rather than emulating the raspi exactly.

I'm thinking about doing my next tutorial about Installing/using Anjuta, so that those of us with years of IDE experience feel a bit more at home.

Are there any other developer-centric topics folks would like me to cover? If I don't know it, I'll learn it, take what I learn and pass it on.

topics developer wise off the top of my head

- setting up the IDE/s  with the build environment in the first place – hello world type stuff

- ways to output debug info (the linux alternative to windows OutputDebugString

- how to single step?

- how to debug remotely?

more tricky questions..

- building on a x86/windows host for the pi target..

- and remote debugging from there?

Great blog!  Thanks for taking the time to write it.

I've done development on Windows and OSX for several years, but very new to coding on Linux (at least with C++).  I tried your "Hello World" and it worked perfectly.  However, I tried using cout by including <iostream> but the compiler cannot find the header file anywhere.  Does Linux not have the same standard libraries?  I tried compiling with gcc and g++ with no luck.  Any ideas?

Thanks again!