Yelläks /ˈyæl•eks/

Currently interns are trying to use bitbake to create an openembedded image for the beagle board. After setting up everything according to the step-by-step instructions, they run into a major problem: the proxy of the Indian Institute of Science.
bitbake uses wget to download the necessary packages. To tell wget that is has to send all requests to the proxy, environment variable are set:

export http_proxy=”http://proxy.example.com:8080″
export ftp_proxy=”http://proxy.example.com:8080″

However if wget is executed by bitbake to download a missing package, the environment variables are gone and wget tries to connect to the HTTP servers directly. A search in the Internet for that particular problem was not successful. A workaround (and not a solution) is to export the variables again, before wget is executed. Changing the recipes might be a never ending task. An easier way is to change the wget executable itself:

1. Open a terminal and type cd /usr/bin/. If the file is not there, you can use which wget to figure out, where it is hidden.
2. mv wget wget.executable (for this you need root permission, getting them by either executing sudo (Ubuntu) or by becoming root with su).
3. Open an editor of your choice and type:
   

   #!/bin/bash
   echo “Using alternative wget…”
   export http_proxy=”http://proxy.example.com:8080″
   export ftp_proxy=”http://proxy.example.com:8080″

   /usr/bin/wget.executable $@

4. Save this file as wget in /usr/bin/ (for that you need to be root again).
5. Change the permission for this file by entering chmod +x wget in the terminal (also as root).
6. Execute bitbake as usual. The echo directive just prints out a message, so you can check, if bitbake is taking the right executable.

I hope, it helps and saves you some time.