Developing Apps with VM

It’s easy to set up a development environment in a virtual machine with virtual disk image (VDI) for VirtualBox, which is based on Debian 8.0 Jessie.

ReadyNAS OS 6 and Debian do not necessarily use the identical libraries, NETGEAR created a change root environment within Debian that contains the same libraries as ReadyNAS OS 6 firmware. Use the change root environment to compile your apps. Because they are installed outside of the change root environment, you can install any tools, including X-Windows based applications, such as Emacs, Eclipse, and so on, without affecting build environment.

To set up a VM development environment:

1. Download and extract VDI image.

The VDI image is available from virtual disk image (VDI) for VirtualBox. The file is about 2.4GB. The unzipped file is called ReadyNAS_Dev.vdi.

2. Create a VM.

Launch VirtualBox and click the New button. The Create Virtual Machine wizard launches. Complete the fields in the Name and operating system screen.

3. Select ReadyNAS_Dev.vdi as the first disk.

In the Hard drive screen, select the Use an existing virtual hard drive file radio button, browse to ReadyNAS_Dev.vdi, and click the Create button.

4. Confirm that the ReadyNAS_Dev.vdi is in the Storage Tree.

5. Click the Start button to launch the VM.

6. Log in to Debian with the following case-sensitive credentials:

• User name: netgear
• Password: password

7. Open the terminal tool. Click the icon in the lower-left corner.

8. Enter the following commands to update the SDK package and build examples.

cd Documents/Development/sdk/
git pull
cd ./examples/
./build.sh

9. Change to the ~/Documents/Development/sdk/examples directory and use the ./build.sh script to build all packages. This process can take some time and might generate some warnings, which you can ignore.

After the script completes, the files in red in the following image are created.

10. Install the Debian apps onto your ReadyNAS OS 6 storage system.

From the local admin page on your ReadyNAS storage system, navigate to Apps tab and click the Upload button.

11. Develop your apps.

If you have questions, please visit the ReadyNAS Community. Other members of the developer community might be able to help you. You can also contact NETGEAR’s developer support team at devreadynas@netgear.com.