help with compiling/making plugins

[kennypu]

Hi, i'm a beginner with rockbox, and I installed it the other day and finally found out how great it was xD. anyways, I'm a game programmer and I was very interested in making games,etc. for rockbox. I tried to compile the helloworld.c, following instruction through the 'simple guide to compiling' guide, and everything worked great except that i felt the compiling is either way to long(feels like if I leave it on, it will compile for several hours), I did something wrong, or its compiling the whole rockbox. My questions would be:
1. if I am compiling the whole rockbox, is there a way to just compile the plugin?
2. If i was doing everything right, would it take a several hours?
Just for more information, I am running XP(sp 2)256 ram, and was trying to compile with cygwin. I read on the forums that cygwin is slow, so I am installing vmware right now, but would it make that much difference? sorry for asking so many questions. Thanks in advance,
  Ken

[cool_walking_]

I don't think you can build plugins without the rest of Rockbox.  Yes, when you built your plugin, it would have built the rest of Rockbox as well, but the good news is it only needs to do this once, and from then on will only compile the parts that have changed since the last compile (unless you run "make clean", which will cause everything to be compiled again).

Compile time is heavily dependent on your CPU, but several hours seems WAAAY too long - my Core 2 Duo in Cygwin takes maybe 5-10 minutes for a full compile.

If you only have 256MB of RAM, I think VMware could possibly take longer since VMware is pretty hefty itself.  I personally don't like VMware since it's networking functionality always seems to break and it even caused problems with the local network for me.

[Llorean]

As long as you know what you're doing, VMWare is plenty reliable, and it often takes less than half the time to compile with VMWare.

[bluebrother]

Just for more information, I am running XP(sp 2)256 ram, and was trying to compile with cygwin.

running WXP with only 256MiB of RAM is slow itself anyway (XP needs quite an amount of RAM, so it will waste quite a lot of time swapping to disc), and putting cygwin on top of it is dog-slow. Using vmware with that less memory should be faster, but I guess it will still swap as hell. You could
- get more memory. IMO this is generally a good idea (unfortunately my machine is maxed out )
- install linux and use a text environment / a rather small GUI environment.

Just for comparison: my machine (P-M, 1.4GHz, 2GiB RAM, Linux) does a complete rebuild of Rockbox in less than 5 minutes.

[nls]

Also the 'make rocks' command will only rebuild codecs and plugins regardelss of changes in the core. Another way to speed it up is removing codecs and plugins form the various SOURCES and SUBDIRS -files.

[kennypu]

woa, whole list of thing to try out  . thanks every1 for your help, I'm sure I can get it to work now. I was gona get more RAM anyways xP. i'll come back if I have anymore problems. thanks again,
  Ken

[kennypu]

Ok i have a problem(i think). I'm at school so i can't give specifics, but when i was compiling this morning, it was strange. it compiled, then it went:
make[1] //doing its thing over here. then
make[1] firmware encoded successfully
then
make[2]...
and repeated all the way up to make[16](the whole compiling process). is it suppose 2 do that? seemed like it wasn't gona stop so i forcefully closed cygwin -.- . thanks in advance,
  Ken

btw, i would appreciate if any 1 can point out what to do from there also(after compilation). thanks again,
  Ken

[mschneider]

have you taken a look at the docs index? it has two or three sections that tell you how to compile (and what to do afterward). As for your makes, that sounds a little weird to me. Did you see what files were being compiled?

[bluebrother]

btw, i would appreciate if any 1 can point out

Please follow our posting guidelines. You are required to use real words, and "any 1" is not a real word. Also, if you don't have a real error message there isn't much to tell about ...

[kennypu]

ok, so i successfully(?) compiled it, and zipped it, but when i checked the files, in the rock folder, there was only sokoban, and another one(I can't tell you the name because im at school). Does any one have an idea why this happened? thanks,
  Ken

[cool_walking_]

(I can't tell you the name because im at school)

I was not aware Rockbox had an X-rated plugin... where is it?

Most of the plugins could have failed to compile for some reason (there should be error messages throughout the "make" output). "make zip" still would have given you a rockbox.zip without the plugins that failed.

[kennypu]

sorry i lied.. it wasn't 2 rock files, but 2 level files, for snake2(snake2.levels) and sokoban(sokoban.levels).Here is a link to a screen shot to whats happening:

photo bucket: darn.jpg

as you can see, its going make[1] make[2] make[3].. if i leave it(which i did for an hour), it went up to make[64] and i clossed it. As I am not good and still a complete beginner at linux development, I am not sure, but I am guessing it is not suppose to do that. Does any one have an idea what I can do to fix that issue, and would it fix if I re-install or change a setting or something on cygwin? thanks in advance,
  Ken

[cool_walking_]

I can't see anything going wrong there, but I don't know what's up with the make[] numbers - I usually only get 1 and 2, though I don't actually know what they mean..

Maybe it would help to see the entire output.  Do "make clean", then "make &> output.txt" and post the resulting output.txt up on http://pastebin.ca .