[chrisdudeperson]

Hi guys,

I'm a complete newbie so do pardon me if the answers are obvious!

I have a raspberry pi with XBMC on it and I'm really enjoying it, however I'd like to develop it to add a couple for functions in.

My question is what's the best way to develop for raspberry pi. Is it easier to do it on the pi itself or develop it in ubuntu and port it over and if that's the case what's involved in porting it?

Many thanks,
Chris

[negge]

Unless you're looking at developing Raspberry Pi specific code you're much better of doing the coding on a PC. I don't know how the current developers do the platform specific stuff, in any case you probably don't want to compile anything on the Pi itself since development would take forever.

[popcornmix]

What distribution are you using on the Pi? What features are you thinking of adding?

Firstly, new devs are always welcome.

If the new features are generic, then it's probably simplest to develop on on desktop platform like Ubuntu. Start here.
You'll find it quicker to build/debug/run on a desktop platform.

Once it's working on Ubuntu, then build the same tree for the pi. OpenELEC is probably easiest. You will still build using Ubuntu (rather than directly on the Pi) using a cross-compiler. See here.

[chrisdudeperson]

I'm using Raspbian currently.

I'm looking to develop it into a car friendly system. So i'll be adding menu items for things like satnav (NavIt), OBDII readings (car diagnostics), fm/dab radio and rear camera. All these menu items will launch other programs and won't be embedded in Kodi as I'm sure that will be a pain.

I'll get a VM with Ubuntu up and running on my Mac then!