[elbe-devel] A newcomer's issues with ELBE

[Norbert Nemec | BLOKS.]

Hi everybody,

I am just taking my first steps with ELBE. The project looks very 
promising, but it will certainly take me some time to find my way 
around. Here just some feedback after my first day. Perhaps someone can 
give me a few hints or even use my experience to smooth out the entry 
curve for future newcomers.

First a notice: I am running Ubuntu 15.10 on my development machine. The 
documentation states Debian as the supported host system. So far Ubuntu 
seems to work fine, but possibly some of my struggles were caused by this.

One other detail that probably explains some of my initial confusion: I 
first started with elbe 0.58 as documented on the website and provided 
as .deb - when I got stuck on an non-informative error message, I tried 
the git version. It took me quite some time to work out the 
fundamentally changed command line interface (initvm instead of create). 
Is an update of the website and the .deb packages planned in the near 
future? Otherwise, a notice on the website might help newcomers avoid 
this confusion.

Ultimately, I managed to debug the error and found that elbe choked over 
a file in /etc/apt/apt.conf.d of my host system, setting 
APT::Default-Release "wily" (the Ubuntu release!). Once I understood 
that, I could work around the problem, but I still wonder why elbe would 
even look at the host system's apt configuration!

Another road-block was the behavior of 'elbe initvm' when the 'tmux' is 
not installed. Quote:
----

$ ./elbe initvm start

ElbeInitVMSession already exists in tmux.

Try 'elbe initvm attach' to attach to the session.

$ ./elbe initvm attach

ElbeInitVMSession does not exist in tmux.

Try 'elbe initvm start' to start the session.

----

A simple check for the availability of 'tmux' might avoid this confusion 
for future users.

Finally, a point of confusion in reading the documentation that hints at 
some fundamental misunderstanding on my side: In docs/quickstart.txt, I 
found the statement:

--------- You will want your initvm to be the same architecture as your 
workstation. This allows using hardware accelerated virtualization 
implemented by kvm. ---------

What does this mean? In my understanding the whole point of setting up 
initvm is to emulate the target architecture. In my case, I want to use 
my amd64 notebook to develop for an ARM embedded board. In my 
understanding, qemu should emulate an arm architecture to install arm 
.deb packages and compile natively for the target architecture. However: 
I still have not found a way to actually set up the initvm as arm 
architecture. At which point did I miss a turn here?

Thanks for any help you can give me!

Greetings,
Norbert

-- 
Dr. Norbert Nemec
Software Manager

BLOKS. GmbH
Agnes-Pockels-Bogen 1
80992 München
Germany

Phone +49 89 5505 461 - 21
Email nn at bloks.de

VAT-ID: DE297724169 | Registered Court: AG Munich | HRB 215232 | Managing Director: Daniel Meermann

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.linutronix.de/pipermail/elbe-devel/attachments/20151113/97e51264/attachment.html>