Hello,
I will not cover here how to create your own build environment for OpenPli as there exists a lot of info on that matter.
So, if you already have a working environment you can follow those steps to create your own repo to install and test your packages on your own machine with opkg install command directly from your build environment.
You will need to install apache on your Ubuntu which is done with following command
sudo apt install apache2
The you will need to start the service with
sudo systemctl start apache2
If you want to have apache started at boot time you will need to run
sudo systemctl enable apache2
Then you will need to find where on your build environment are packages generated, in my case for Vu+ Solo4K are in .....build/tmp/deploy/ipk
Here are 3 folders
./all ./armv7ahf-neon ./vusolo4k
You will need to create symlinks (shortcuts) for each folder in /var/www/html , so, go to your ipk folder then create symlinks for each folder as following example
First, find the power directory (actual full path)
pwd
The pwd command will display entire path, in my case is
/home/marc/Documents/VUPLUS/openpli-oe-core-7.2/build/tmp/deploy/ipk
Use the full path (your own) for all folders to be added to apache webroot creating symlinks as following
ln -s /home/marc/Documents/VUPLUS/openpli-oe-core-7.2/build/tmp/deploy/ipk/all/ /var/www/html/ ln -s /home/marc/Documents/VUPLUS/openpli-oe-core-7.2/build/tmp/deploy/ipk/armv7ahf-neon/ /var/www/html/ ln -s /home/marc/Documents/VUPLUS/openpli-oe-core-7.2/build/tmp/deploy/ipk/vusolo4k/ /var/www/html/
You should be able to access the new repo over the web at http://localhost/all for example
Because the URL does not contain any index files will throw a 404 error, but is fine as long as do not throw other errors, most common could be related to followsymilnk apache configuration which can be by default disabled, then you need to enable that in apache conf and restart apache
Now all is set, you will need to use opkg-utils to create repos for this clone the tools on your machine
git clone git://git.yoctoproject.org/opkg-utils make sudo make install
Then you will need to create packages lists for each folder with ipk files as following
cd /home/marc/Documents/VUPLUS/openpli-oe-core-7.2/build/tmp/deploy/ipk/all/ opkg-make-index . > Packages gzip -f Packages
Do above 3 steps for each folder which contains ipk files.
Then you need to add on your machine/stb your new repos to /etc/opkg config folder to allow opkg to install from your own repo
First of all backup the original /etc/opkg in a separate folder then create a new one with all config files, one per above folders
touch ms-all-feed.conf
which contain the URL based on your computer's ip address as the following line
src/gz openpli-all http://192.168.1.13/all
And a feed file for armv7ahf-neon as ms-armv7ahf-neon.conf
src/gz openpli-all http://192.168.1.13/armv7ahf-neon
and the last one ms-vusolo4k.conf
src/gz openpli-all http://192.168.1.13/vusolo4k
After that, you have your feed configurations ready to be used update the opkg database with following command on your machine
opkg update
Then you can start install packages from your own repo
Congratulations!
You can swap between your repo and original image's repo by swap the /etc/opkg folder and issuing an opkg update command, for example if your newly created ipk needs to test auto install dependencies at some point to see what packages can be installed from original feed and which ones should be provided because does not exists there.
Do not forget
- rebuild packages each time you add a new ipk or rebuild a package
- do an opkg update after each package update/rebuild in the feed
- you can swap your opkg folder with the original folder provided by the image, if you forgot to do a backup download your image again and extract the folder from the image
Enjoy,
Marc
