Hi there

I'm a student here at Loughborough university in the UK. Every year, people taking my degree have to take a course where we have to make an ARM AEB1 (with ARM7DI core) turn magically into an MP3 player. Of course, it's a rubbish MP3 player, but nonetheless we have to do it to get marks.

Questions:

1) I am trying to use the arm-elf-*** set of tools both under Linux RH7.2 and Cygwin. I have no idea where the cygwin tools came from, but I can trace back the heritage of the arm-elf-*** tools under linux to the guy at uni who installed them. Which system would you guys recommend I use to do the development, bearing in mind the cygwin machine is my home machine and the linux machine is not on a network and only has a floppy drive and a CD drive.

2) Aside from the above recommendation, I have been playing with the configure script under both systems, but I am a little shakey in my knowledge of what it does exactly. Could someone explain it's precise function (or an approximation of it, any way)

3) With respect to my playing around with ./configure, I am having problems getting it to recognise my cross compiler both under Linux AND Cygwin. I know enough about configure to know that it's going to try to detect gcc, the type of host etc., and take some parameters/options which help it build a makefile for my target. So, when I do

shell$ CC=/usr/local/bin/arm-elf-gcc ./configure --target=arm-elf

I get this in config.log:

configure:744: checking for a BSD compatible install configure:797: checking whether build environment is sane configure:854: checking whether make sets ${MAKE} configure:900: checking for working aclocal configure:913: checking for working autoconf configure:926: checking for working automake configure:939: checking for working autoheader configure:952: checking for working makeinfo configure:980: checking host system type configure:1005: checking for gcc configure:1118: checking whether the C compiler (gcc ) works configure:1134: gcc -o conftest conftest.c 1>&5 /usr/local/arm-elf/bin/ld: cannot open crt0.o: No such file or directory collect2: ld returned 1 exit status configure: failed program was:

#line 1129 "configure" #include "confdefs.h"

main(){return(0);}

I copied across the crt0.o file I have (full of ARM assembly) to the directory where I am running configure, and the error progresses to

...SNIP configure:952: checking for working makeinfo configure:980: checking host system type configure:1005: checking for gcc configure:1118: checking whether the C compiler (gcc ) works configure:1134: gcc -o conftest conftest.c 1>&5 /usr/local/arm-elf/bin/ld: cannot find -lc collect2: ld returned 1 exit status configure: failed program was:

#line 1129 "configure" #include "confdefs.h"

main(){return(0);}

I am no expert in these matters, but if someone could point me in the right direction, I'd be appreciative. I know that copying across the compiler runtime object file (crt0.o) into the same directory as configure isn't going to be the fix, but I just did it to debug what's going on, and it looks like when my arm- elf-*** tools are compiling anywhere but in a subdirectory of themselves, it doesn't know where it's files are.

regards

Alex

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Alex Netterville. Student - Third Year - Electronics and Software Engineering (MEng) Loughborough University