During last month I did testing how building Poky Linux works under few commercial GNU/Linux distributions. Due to costs I used their free versions (CentOS instead of RHEL and OpenSUSE instead of SLED).
CentOS 5.1
First was CentOS 5.1 as someone asked does Poky works under newest RHEL distribution. With VirtualBox it was easy to start with. But CentOS installation over network is total CRAP. You have to enter HTTP mirror name by hand, then (also by hand) enter path on server… Doing such installations on real hardware definitely require having second machine or long preparation. Of course you can also use CDs as install media. But then better burn all 6 of them or be surprised that #2 is needed for few packages…
But finally I installed it and landed in 2006 software… Out of box CentOS does not have required packages or have them in so old versions that search for unofficial repositories or compile software by hand is required.
Two days later (time of build) I had “poky-image-sato” and “poky-image-sdk” built. But QEmu does not want to work on this distribution so I had to say goodbye to binary locales generation.
OpenSUSE 10.3
Second one was OpenSUSE 10.3 version. This one also has network install CD which require entering name of HTTP mirror and path. But here I got few new surprises… First it ask for IP address of server but accept normal name. Second was that when I made mistake in path it ask them again but gave me old values so I only had to fix instead of typing whole path.
After installation I had to add some packages but this time no extra repositories were needed. OpenSUSE lack gcc 3.x so we added gcc-native 3.4.4 into Poky and QEmu binary locale generation was working.
Summary
Free versions of commercial distributions require a bit of time to install all required packages but then building Poky Linux under them is working like it should (except QEmu problem under CentOS).