I am currently developing a custom Roaming VoIP PBX as a Raspberry Pi image, which requires frequent rebuilding of project packages. Compiling packages directly on the Raspberry Pi is not ideal as it can take several hours. Therefore, I was looking for a tool to create the base image on a more powerful machine, such as my laptop or a VPS.
A good starting point is this blog post on building your own Raspberry Pi image. It includes a shell script for building the image (right-click and select ‘download as’).
Here are some useful links regarding cross-compilation and QEMU (for emulating and compiling in a Raspberry Pi environment):
- How to compile FFmpeg for Raspberry Pi (Raspbian)
- Raspbian Documentation
- Development Environment Raspberry Pi Cross-Compiler
- A Raspberry Pi emulated environment on OS X Lion
- QEMU Emulating Raspberry Pi The Easy Way
- Raspberry Pi Forum Discussion on QEMU
- Blog post on Raspberry Pi QEMU Emulation
- RPi Kernel Compilation (Cross compiling from OSX)
Update (May 2013)
Sometime ago, I created a repository with helper scripts: https://github.com/andrius/build-raspbian-image. Feel free to check it out!