Scratchbox 2

Scratchbox 2 (often abbreviated to "sb2" or "sbox2") is a cross-compilation toolkit designed to make embedded Linux application development easier. It also provides a full set of tools to integrate and cross-compile an entire Linux distribution.

Functional description
In the Linux world, when building software, many parameters are auto-detected on the host system (like installed libraries and system configuration), for example through Autotools'  scripts. When one wants to build software for an embedded target by cross-compilation, most auto-detected parameters are incorrect: I.e. host configuration is not the same as the embedded target's configuration, hence the name cross-compilation.

Without Scratchbox 2, one has to manually set many parameters and "hack" the "configure process" to generate working executable code for the embedded target.

Scratchbox 2 allows one to set up a "virtual" environment that will trick Autotools and other executables into thinking that they are directly running on the embedded target with its configuration.

Moreover, Scratchbox 2 provides a technology called CPU-transparency that goes further: With CPU-transparency, executables built for the host CPU or for the target CPU could be executed directly on the host with sb2 handling the task to emulate a different CPU-architecture if necessary to run software components compiled for the target CPU. Hence a build process can mix using programs built for different CPU-architectures. That is especially useful when a build process requires to build a software component first as a build dependency for building another software component: For example, a "Lexer" must be built first in order to generate code for / of another software component with it.

Projects using Scratchbox 2

 * Tizen
 * Maemo
 * MeeGo / Mer
 * Sailfish OS
 * WIDK − WebOS Internals Development Kit
 * Raspberry Pi (used to build binaries for the Raspberry Pi alpha board)

Historic Git repositories of Scratchbox 2

 * at GitHub provides an unaltered mirror of the former Scratchbox 2 Git repository at Gitorious with its latest Git tag being  on 2012-09-05.
 * (up to tag  on 2013-04-25) and   (up to tag   on 2014-03-05), both at GitHub, show intermediate states before the Nemo / Mer merger, when Scratchbox 2's active source tree was moved to the now dissolved.
 * The continuation of the former source code repository  is   at GitHub, which contains all commit history and Git tags of all aforementioned Git repositories.