Scratchbox2 (sbox2 or sb2) is a cross-compilation toolkit designed to make embedded Linux application development easier. It also provides a full set of tools to integrate and cross-compile an entire Linux distribution.
In the Linux world, when building software, many parameters are auto-detected based on the host system (like installed libraries and system configurations), through autotools "./configure" scripts for example. When one wants to build for an embedded target (cross-compilation), most of the detected parameters are incorrect (i.e. host configuration is not the same as the embedded target configuration).
Without Scratchbox2, one has to manually set many parameters and "hack" the "configure" process to be able to generate code for the embedded target.
Scratchbox2 allows one to set up a "virtual" environment that will trick the autotools and executables into thinking that they are directly running on the embedded target with its configuration.
Moreover, Scratchbox2 provides a technology called CPU-transparency that goes further in that area. With CPU-transparency, executables built for the host CPU or for the target CPU could be executed directly on the host with sbox2 handling the task to CPU-emulate if needed to run a program compiled for the target CPU. So, a build process could mix the usage of program built for different CPU architectures. That is especially useful when a build process requires building the program X to be able to use it to build the program Y (Example: building a Lexer that will be used to generate code for a specific package).
Projects using Scratchbox2
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Tizen
Tizen () is a Linux-based mobile operating system backed by the Linux Foundation, mainly developed and used primarily by Samsung Electronics.
The project was originally conceived as an HTML5-based platform for mobile devices to succeed MeeGo. Sa ...
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Maemo
Maemo is a software platform originally developed by Nokia, now developed by the community, for smartphones and Internet tablets. The platform comprises both the Maemo operating system and SDK. Maemo played a key role in Nokia's strategy to com ...
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MeeGo
MeeGo is a discontinued Linux distribution hosted by the Linux Foundation, using source code from the operating systems Moblin (produced by Intel) and Maemo (produced by Nokia). Primarily targeted at mobile devices and information appliances in ...
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Mer
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WIDK webOS Internals Development Kit
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Raspberry Pi
Raspberry Pi () is a series of small single-board computers (SBCs) developed in the United Kingdom by the Raspberry Pi Foundation in association with Broadcom. The Raspberry Pi project originally leaned towards the promotion of teaching basic ...
(Used to build binaries for the Raspberry Pi alphaboard)
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Sailfish OS
Sailfish OS is a Linux-based operating system based on free software, and open source projects such as Mer as well as including a closed source UI. The project is being developed by the Finnish company Jolla.
The OS first shipped with the o ...
External links
Official Scratchbox2 website and wikiScratchbox2 for Debian presentation by Riku Voipio
{{Linux
Embedded Linux
Build automation