Preparing a development environment for the Kobo Wifi

This article is part of an extended series on Kobo development and investigation

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Apparently I have to make this more obvious:

• Take a backup of your Kobo's SD card before doing anything. If something doesn't work, you can't fix your Kobo without this backup. I will not send you a backup.
• Any device hacking is risky. If you can't afford to break your device, leave now.

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First, I'd like to thank the KoboLabs members for being so helpful and responsive as I try to get up and running with Kobo development. They've pushed several tools, config files, scripts etc to the KoboLabs repository, all of which have drastically reduced the amount of time it's taken to get up and running and largely eliminated the need for reverse-engineering work. This is incredibly unusual for an embedded company, and absolutely wonderful. I was already impressed by their ongoing releases of new firmwares for the original Kobo after the release of the Wifi, as most companies just drop supports old products. Now I'm blown away. Please tell people how damn impressive the Kobo folks are with their after-sales product support and maintenance; I know I will be.

In fact, this whole document has been rendered largely unnecessary by improvements to the KoboLabs code drops. They've posted their build scripts and configurations. To get started, just clone the git repo and read documentation/README.

Overview

You will need to download the CodeSourcery toolchain used for Kobo development, then build the libraries the Kobo uses so that you can link your new executables against them. Qt Embedded, with its dependencies, is particularly crucial. The latest GitHub code drop includes the Qt Embedded configuration used on the Kobo, letting you compile a compatible version of Qt.

Installing Sourcery G++

Download Sourcery G++ 2010q1-202 4.4.1 for your platform and run the installer.

If you're on an x64 RPM-based Linux distro, you may need to install a 32-bit userspace to be able to run the tools. x64 Debian/Ubuntu users will have to install them in the 32-bit chroot, and do all future steps described here within that chroot.

cd ~/Downloads
chmod a+x arm-2010q1-202-arm-none-linux-gnueabi.bin
./arm-2010q1-202-arm-none-linux-gnueabi.bin

Accept the default install path of $HOME/CodeSourcery/Sourcery_G++_Lite when prompted. Accept all other installer defaults.

You now need to symlink your tools to new names, as some of the Kobo makefiles etc expect the tools to be named arm-linux-x where they're named arm-linux-gnuegabi-none-x by CodeSourcery. To do this:

cd ~/CodeSourcery/Sourcery_G++_Lite/bin
for f in arm-none-linux-gnueabi-* ; do ln -s $f arm-linux-${f:23}; done

If all is configured properly, after a logout & login or after running "bash -l" you should now be able to type "arm-linux-g++" and get the response "arm-linux-c++: no input files".

Compiling libraries

Now that we have a toolchain in place, including gcc, binutils, glibc, and all of that provided for us by the wonderful folks at CodeSourcery, we can get on with the real work of preparing our dev environment.

Clone a copy of the KoboLabs git repository to get the required sources and patches:

mkdir ~/kobo
cd ~/kobo
git clone git://github.com/kobolabs/Kobo-Reader.git koboreader

This will take a while, as it's downloading the sources to a lot of libraries the Linux kernel used on the Kobo, and more.

Once you've cloned the repository, it should be easy to get going. A reasonable option might be:

echo "DEVICEROOT=$HOME/kobo/fs" > ~/kobo/build/build-config-user.sh
mkdir ~/kobo/tmp
cd ~/kobo/tmp
../koboreader/build/build-all.sh

... which will use the Kobo build scripts to compile all the libraries and install them in DEVICEROOT, which you set to $HOME/kobo/fs . The unpacked sources and temporary object files will be stored in ~/kobo/tmp , so your git clone of the kobo sources doesn't get messed up by the build.

Now you need to build Qt, which you can do by following the instructions in documentation/README.trolltech