[vwinstead]

The preferences I'm using are the same that you're showing.
Tools -> Start QEMU works!
Opening up the Hello World project from iRex works too!

Now I have to figure out how to build the project and test it with QEMU.

Of course this was after a couple stumbling blocks. These are noteworthy:

Ran Tools -> Start QEMU but ran into the following error:
Error, please set /proc/sys/vm/mmap_min_addr to 0 since otherwise it can cause problems with QEMU
following line fixed that:
sudo sysctl -w vm.mmap_min_addr=0

What's that all about?

I also remembered an error I saw when I first ran "apt-get update". things went smoothly until I hit a "Hash Sum Mismatch" error with sources.bz2. See below for the error message during the update:

Hit http://security.ubuntu.com hardy-security/multiverse Packages
Hit http://security.ubuntu.com hardy-security/multiverse Sources
Hit http://us.archive.ubuntu.com hardy-updates/restricted Packages
Hit http://us.archive.ubuntu.com hardy-updates/main Sources
Hit http://us.archive.ubuntu.com hardy-updates/restricted Sources
Fetched 7452B in 10s (716B/s)
W: Failed to fetch http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/...pdates/Release Unable to find expected entry universedeb-src/binary-i386/Packages in Meta-index file (malformed Release file?)

W: Failed to fetch http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/di...ce/Sources.bz2 Hash Sum mismatch

E: Some index files failed to download, they have been ignored, or old ones used instead.

Do you think this is a big problem? This still happens even after I changed the sources.list file from hardy to gutsy.

Unrelated questions:

I downloaded the pinky version of Poky. Is it useful for anything? Looks like the poky directory supplied by iRex is all I need, right?
What is OpenEmbedded cross-compile environment useful for? Is this part of the development process or is it one of the underlying pieces that we don't need to worry about?