Best way to tune a distro and to build a toolchain for it

[Valentin Longchamp <valentin.longchamp@epfl.ch>]

Hello,

We have designed a processor board in our laboratory that we are going 
to use to control our robots for experiments. The board is now supported 
in OE (mx31moboard machine) and I am very happy to be able to build a 
Linux distro for our board thank to OE.

Until now I have used the Angstrom distro with success. Now since my use 
is mostly going to be for a robot with no screen (and of course no 
PIM/agenda, games and these kinds of things) I have always built a 
console-image. However now I would like to add some packages by default 
in the images that I want to build for our robot (for instance hal is 
needed by one of our softs, I would like it to be included by default).

I could do this by adding these packages in the MACHINE_EXTRA_RDEPENDS 
variable in the machine config file, but I think this is more a distro 
question.

To summarize: what would be the best way to create a "robotic version" 
of angstrom in OE ?

The second question is about toolchains. This platform is going to be 
used by many other labs that are going to use our robots or at least our 
hardware. I would like to be able to build a "sdk" for them, with all 
the libs that we include by default in their sdk (because I already fear 
all the mechanical engineers that would have to build OE ...). I can 
build meta-toolchain, but how could I tune a toolchain so that it 
includes for instance all the headers for the libs that I would add in 
my "robotic version" of anstrom ?

Thank you for your help.

Val

-- 
Valentin Longchamp, PhD Student, EPFL-STI-LSRO1
valentin.longchamp@epfl.ch, Phone: +41216937827
http://people.epfl.ch/valentin.longchamp
MEA3485, Station 9, CH-1015 Lausanne