In order to get started quickly (source) you can build an image for qemu-x86 with the following commands
# apt-get install gawk wget git-core diffstat unzip texinfo gcc-multilib \
build-essential chrpath libsdl1.2-dev xterm
$ git clone git://git.openembedded.org/openembedded-core oe-core && cd oe-core
$ git clone git://git.openembedded.org/bitbake bitbake
$ git checkout fido && cd bitbake && git checkout 1.26 && cd -
$ source ./oe-init-build-env