This buildroot fork will produce a very light-weight and trimmed down toolchain, rootfs and kernel for the Raspberry Pi. It also includes Qt5 WebKit and Gstreamer libraries / plugins.

A reference browser implementation "mlbrowser" is installed by default.

You will need to install some packages on your host machine, for e.g. on Ubuntu 12.04:

sudo apt-get install build-essential git subversion cvs unzip whois ncurses-dev bc mercurial

For host machines with kernel 3.8 or higher (e.g. Ubuntu 13.04) you can use the experimental F2FS filesystem:

sudo apt-get install build-essential git subversion cvs unzip whois ncurses-dev bc mercurial f2fs-tools

When creating a VM please allocate a minimal of 15GB disk space.

git clone git://github.com/albertd/buildroot-rpi.git

or

git clone https://github.com/albertd/buildroot-rpi.git

followed by

cd buildroot-rpi
make rpi_defconfig
make menuconfig      # if you want to add packages
make                 # build (NOTICE: Don't use the **-j** switch, it's set to auto-detect)

You will need to create two partitions on your sdcard and copy files to the appropriate partitons.

The first (boot) is a small W95 FAT32 (LBA) partition of about 100 MB in size.

Notice you will need to replace sdx in the following commands with the actual device node for your sdcard.

# run the following as root
mkfs.vfat -F 32 -n boot /dev/sdx1
mkdir -p /media/boot
mount /dev/sdx1 /media/boot

You will need to copy all the files in output/images/rpi-firmware and the kernel from output/images/zImage to your boot partition.

# run the following as root
cp output/images/rpi-firmware/* /media/boot
cp output/images/zImage /media/boot
sync
umount /media/boot

The second (rootfs) can be as big in size as you prefer, but with a 200 MB minimum. It should be formatted as ext4.

# run the following as root
mkfs.ext4 -L rootfs /dev/sdx2
mkdir -p /media/rootfs
mount /dev/sdx2 /media/rootfs

Alternatively, you can use the F2FS filesystem (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F2FS). In this case your host machine requires kernel version 3.8 or higher.

# run the following as root
mkfs.f2fs -l rootfs /dev/sdx2
mkdir -p /media/rootfs
mount -t f2fs /dev/sdx2 /media/rootfs

You will need to extract output/images/rootfs.tar to the partition, as root.

# run the following as root
tar -xvpsf output/images/rootfs.tar -C /media/rootfs # replace with your mount directory
sed -i /media/rootfs/etc/fstab -e "s/ext4/f2fs/" # only if F2FS is used
sync
umount /media/rootfs

You can login to the system using ssh. The default password is set to root. It is configurable with make menuconfig.

ssh root@192.168.1.100 # replace with your ip address

Please goto http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=43087

Would you like to join our team? Drop your details at recruitment@metrological.com or fork this repository and send us your Pull Requests.

For the proprietary packages, e.g. Gstreamer Codec Pack, DASH plugin and PlayReady support, please contact us at sales@metrological.com