Eclipse

Eclipse is an IDE that is highly configurable through plug-ins. I have 2 reasons for learning how to use it:

1. I would like to use it to point to my cross-compiled uClibc toolchain so I can build projects to learn embedded Linux
2. I am working on a little VM of my own design and I'd like to make a syntax highlighter for my assembly and use it to assemble them for running in the VM

So I went through the 2 hour download in Synaptic. Now it's installed and I'm going through the extensive documentation. I must say, that even thought the docs are extensive, I don't have enough context to really have a grip on them. So, I think I'll start with a nice little project of attempting to compile my Hello World project.

It was a little disorienting at the beginning. The CDT package has a lot of stuff. I used the managed make system where Eclipse makes the makefiles for me. But eventually I got it figured out.

I had to do a few things to get it working. First, I needed to get my toolchain binaries into a directory. The binaries seem to all be under a directory called 'staging_dir' so they are all together. The other thing I had to do was set up macros and environment variables in Eclipse as well as point to the binaries.

Now that I've played with it for a little while, I learning a few things. First, it seems to matter where you build the toolchain. I built it and then moved stuff. But probably the thing to do is build it somewhere and create directory links to the important directories. The compiler seems to know where stuff was originally and it isn't happy when I move it. The libraries, I can deal with by setting up search directories in the linker settings, but the crt1.o seems to need to be in the same place.

So now to figure out how to make a link. I think it's 'ln' something....