6.2. POSIX Hosts

POSIX hosts are most Unix operating systems such as Linux, FreeBSD and NetBSD. RTEMS development works well on Unix and can scale from a single user and a desktop machine to a team with decentralised or centralised development infrastructure.

6.2.1. Root Access

You either have root access to your host development machine or you do not. Some users are given hardware that is centrally managed. If you do not have root access you can create your work environment in your home directory. You could use a prefix of $HOME/development/rtems or $HOME/rtems. Note, the $HOME environment variable can be substituted with ~.

Chapter 7 Section 1 - Prefixes details using Prefixes to manage the installation.

RTEMS Tools and packages do not require root access to be built and we encourage you to not build the tools as root. If you need to control write access then it is best to manage this with groups assigned to users.

If you have root access you can decide to install the tools under any suitable prefix. This may depend on the hardware in your host development machine. If the machine is a centralised build server the prefix may be used to separate production versions from the test versions and the prefix paths may have restricted access rights to only those who manage and have configuration control of the machine. We call this project sandboxing and Chapter 7 Section 1.1 - Project Sandboxing explains this in more detail.

6.2.2. Linux

A number of different Linux distrubutions are known to work. The following have been tested and report as working.

6.2.2.1. ArchLinux

The following packages are required on a fresh Archlinux 64bit installation:

# pacman -S base-devel gdb xz unzip ncurses git zlib

Archlinux, by default installs texinfo-5 which is incompatible for building GCC 4.7 tree. You will have to obtain texinfo-legacy from AUR and provide a manual override:

# pacman -R texinfo
$ yaourt -S texinfo-legacy
# ln -s /usr/bin/makeinfo-4.13a /usr/bin/makeinfo

6.2.2.2. CentOS

The following packages are required on a minimal CentOS 6.3 64bit installation:

# yum install autoconf automake binutils gcc gcc-c++ gdb make patch \
bison flex xz unzip ncurses-devel texinfo zlib-devel python-devel git

The minimal CentOS distribution is a specific DVD that installs a minimal system. If you use a full system some of these packages may have been installed.

6.2.2.3. Fedora

The RTEMS Source Builder has been tested on Fedora 19 64bit with the following packages:

# yum install ncurses-devel python-devel git bison gcc cvs gcc-c++ \
     flex texinfo patch perl-Text-ParseWords zlib-devel

6.2.2.4. Raspbian

The is the Debian distribution for the Raspberry Pi. The following packages are required:

$ sudo apt-get install autoconf automake bison flex binutils gcc g++ gdb \
texinfo unzip ncurses-dev python-dev git

It is recommended you get Model B of the Pi with 512M of memory and to mount a remote disk over the network. The tools can be built on the network disk with a prefix under your home directory as recommended and end up on the SD card.

6.2.2.5. Ubuntu

The latest version is Ubuntu 18.04.1 LTS 64-bit. This section also includes Xubuntu. A minimal installation was used and the following packages installed:

$ sudu apt-get build-dep gcc-defaults g++ gdb git unzip pax bison \
       flex libpython-dev git libncurses5-dev zlib1g-dev

Note that in previous versions of Ubuntu, the package libpython-dev was python2.7-dev. The name of packages changes over time. You need the package with Python development libraries for C/C++ programs.

It is likely necessary that you will have to enable the Ubuntu Source Repositories. Users have suggested the following web pages which have instructions:

• https://askubuntu.com/questions/158871/how-do-i-enable-the-source-code-repositories/158872
• https://askubuntu.com/questions/496549/error-you-must-put-some-source-uris-in-your-sources-list

6.2.2.6. Linux Mint

zlib package is required on Linux Mint. It has a different name (other than the usual zlib-dev):

# sudo apt-get install zlib1g-dev

6.2.2.7. openSUSE

This has been reported to work but no instructions were provided. This is an opportunity to contribute. Please submit any guidance you can provide.

6.2.3. FreeBSD

The RTEMS Source Builder has been tested on FreeBSD 9.1, 10.3 and 11 64bit version. You need to install some ports. They are:

# cd /usr/ports
# portinstall --batch lang/python27

If you wish to build Windows (mingw32) tools please install the following ports:

# cd /usr/ports
# portinstall --batch devel/mingw32-binutils devel/mingw32-gcc
# portinstall --batch devel/mingw32-zlib devel/mingw32-pthreads

The +zlip+ and +pthreads+ ports for MinGW32 are used for builiding a Windows QEMU.

If you are on FreeBSD 10.0 and you have pkgng installed you can use ‘pkg install’ rather than ‘portinstall’.

6.2.4. NetBSD

The RTEMS Source Builder has been tested on NetBSD 6.1 i386. Packages to add are:

# pkg_add ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/packages/NetBSD/i386/6.1/devel/gmake-3.82nb7.tgz
# pkg_add ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/packages/NetBSD/i386/6.1/devel/bison-2.7.1.tgz
# pkg_add ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/packages/NetBSD/i386/6.1/archivers/xz-5.0.4.tgz