ZenLinux Blog

After teaching a very successful Yocto Project hands-on lab at the Intel Developer Forum last September, I learned that there was a lot of demand for training resources along these lines. Rather than having me fly out to various Intel sites to teach these courses, I decided it would be better to develop some hands-on labs in video format, so we’d have some “scalable” training materials to meet the demand.

The first screencast video was publicly released last week at the Embedded Linux Conference in Redwood City, CA. It’s a half-hour long and combines some introductory theory with hands-on exercises you can follow along with.

Getting Started with the Yocto Project – New Developer Screencast Tutorial from Yocto Project on Vimeo.

Note: You’ll probably want to view the video in full-screen mode when viewing the more detailed slides and during the live demos. You can also directly download the video in Windows Media format (300 MB) or Ogg Theora format (500 MB).

Topics covered include:

• An overview of the Poky build system
• How the Poky sources are organized (types of metadata and where to find them)
• How to build your first Linux image and run it under emulation
• An introduction to recipes and an explanation of the most common types of metadata, using actual recipe examples
• An introduction to layers
• Where to obtain Yocto BSPs from
• How simple it is to download and enable a Yocto BSP
• Where to find further project resources (documentation, mailing lists, git repository, bugzilla)

By the end of this screencast, a new user will understand fundamental concepts about the build system, and be able to start their exploration of the Yocto Project with a solid foundation of knowledge.

Quite honestly, creating this screencast was pretty agonizing, as the video editing tools Linux offers are either horribly complicated or extremely unstable. Perhaps at some point I’ll write up everything I learned about screencasting and give a talk for PLUG. 🙂

This won’t be the last screencast, but I can’t promise a timetable for the next one just yet.