If you're new to VMware, you probably want to start by installing the free VMware Player. If you want more flexibility and don't mind the overhead of running your virtualization software as a background service (and are ok with the security consequences) then you might prefer VMware Server (also free). If you have a want to spend some money, VMware Workstation is probably the ideal tool for this job, but player should be fine for most.  The images available on this website should work with just about any of the VMware products (I'm using Server and Player, because I'm a "starving college student")

From here on out, I'm assuming that you've successfully installed VMware Player.

The next step is to download a copy of my Blackfin Development VM (hopefully you've already started this, because the files are huge). Make sure you save it on a partition which can handle large files (NTFS works, FAT32 doesn't, most XP or Vista machines use NTFS).

You'll then need to decompress the download. I'm using tar and bzip2 to compress the images because of the good compression ratios and because zip can't handle large files. Unfortunately this means that you'll need an external tool. Either 7-Zip or WinRAR should be able to decompress the download for you. If you're comfortable on the command line you should be able to pick up copies of bzip2 and tar that have been compiled for Windows various places on the net if that's easier for you (of course, the people who would do this don't need me to tell them how). Be warned that you will need about 25G of free space to decompress the images! (and they may grow some with use).

Before you actually fire up VMware you'll want to configure the network interfaces it uses (unless you're lucky and only have one physical interface). To do this you need to open up whatever directory you installed VMware Player (procedure is probably the same for Server and Workstation) and locate "vmnetcfg.exe". If you took the defaults during install it will be located in C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware Player. Open up "vmnetcfg.exe" (if you're running Vista, right click it and choose "Run as Administrator") and switch to the "Host Virtual Network Mapping" tab. You should have a window that looks a little like this:



Set VMnet0 to your primary network card (probably your Internet facing one). If you're using a second card to talk to the Blackfin (strongly recommended during early development) then assign that to one of the other, unused slots. Then click OK and fire up VMware player.

Click the big yellow file folder (the "Open" button) and choose "Ubuntu Blackfin Environment.vmx" which should have been included in the file you downloaded.  After a few minutes you should get a screen that looks like this:



Congratulations, You now have a full blown Linux development system!

Perhaps the first thing you should know is that if your mouse gets stuck in VMware you can press control+alt to release it.

Next, depending on the size of your screen, you may want to adjust the size of the VM. You can do this by dragging down the System menu on the top of the screen and choosing Preferences-> Screen Resolution. Set it to whatever works for you -- rather than actually changing your screen resolution it will just resize the virtual screen.

From here, you can just start doing your development if you want, but I'd keep reading...

Since most of your work will probably involve the command line anyway, I would minimize VMware and go grab a copy of PuTTY. You can then use PuTTY to connect to the virtual machine which is often easier to use than the GUI window (unless of course you're using the X based kernel configurator or something).

To connect PuTTY to the VM you first need to know the VM's network address. The easiest way to find this is to open up a terminal (Applications -> Accessories -> Terminal) and enter "/sbin/ifconfig". Chances are you're interested in the IP Address assigned to "eth0". You should be able to just enter that address into PuTTY and hit "Open". When prompted, the username is "uclinux" and the password is "blackfin" (both lowercase, don't type the quotes). If your Blackfin board is on the same network as the card which you assigned to "VMnet0" then this is also the address you want to tell u-boot to grab files from.

Other Details:

If for some reason, you need to become root (administrator) you can enter "sudo su -" and give it "blackfin" as the password. "blackfin" is also the password for any other Administrative task you may want to do (unless you change it with "passwd")

The u-boot source is located in ~uclinux/u-boot/u-boot/
The uClinux and kernel sources are located in ~uclinux/uclinux/uclinux-dist

Both are under source control using git. You can change directories into any of the above and run "git pull" to get the latest version (the password is "anonymous" when you're asked). If you have changed something and want to go back to the stock distribution from the blackfin.uclinux.org you can run "git clean -f -d -x". Be warned that if you do this in ~uclinux/uclinux/uclinux-dist you will need to replace the symbolic link that puts the kernel sources where the makefiles expect them to be. "ln -sf ../linux-kernel ./linux-2.6.x" should do the trick.

Check out the git website for more information on using git. It's very powerful and I highly recommend you learn to use it.