Adding packages to your image

Yocto uses a recipe to fetch sources, build binaries, package them into deb’s and installs them to our image. The recipies are bundled into layers. To add a package you need to check if it’s in the provided layers. In some cases there may be multiple layers providing a package with the same name (overlayed). Or a recipe in one layer maybe modified (appended) in another.

Often the recipe name can be found using the name of the same package on Debian.

Finding recipes in our layers

devtool search recipe-name

Search for recipe names.

bitbake-layers show-layers

Shows the current configured layers.

bitbake-layers show-recipes

Lists available recipes and the layers that provide them.

bitbake-layers show-overlayed

A recipe is overlayed when a recipe with the same name exists in another layer that has a higher layer priority.

bitbake-layers show-appends

Lists .bbappend files and the recipe files to which they apply.

bitbake-layers show-cross-depends

Lists dependency relationships between recipes that cross layer boundaries.

bitbake -s, --show-versions

Show current and preferred versions of all recipes.

Finding layers that provide a specific recipe

Yocto indexes known sources (including edison-fw/meta-intel-edison) for recipes. You can search it at https://layers.openembedded.org/layerindex/branch/scarthgap/recipes/. If you know the recipe name here you will find which layer to add and where to find it.

Alternative you can search for layers to find which recipies are provided.

Layers are added to out/linux64/build/conf/bblayers.conf. You can do that manually, or modify setup.sh to git clone it and add to bblayers.conf automatically.

Installing packages

You can either add (pre-install) a package to your image or install it at run time. At run time (similar as on your Debian based desktop) you can copy the packages to Edison and install using dpkg.

dpkg -i *.deb

If you created a repository you can use the CLI apt or TUI aptitude to fetch and install the package and it’s dependencies automatically. But remember, only the packages you built will be avaialbe in your repository.

apt-get install my-package

See also Adding packages and Creating a DEB repository.