Installation instructions

Installation instructions

The installation of the APES framework is rather straightforward, at least when things go smoothly which usually is unfortunately not so often the case. It only comes as source, as it is opensource GPL’ed software.

The instructions below assume you run a debian-based GNU/Linux distribution, it is left to the reader to adapt to his/her own distro. You also need to have git installed, and a not too old version (git 1.7.2.5 and above are reputed to work with our repos).

Get the sources

First, clone the Apes repository. Recently, Apes has been reorganized as git submodules, making the fetch automatic and always up to date. To get the whole stuff, here is how to proceed:

And you are all set. Older git have no branch option to clone, so the process is a bit more complex:

Prerequisites

In order to correctly compile the GNU toolchains and get the APES tools working, you need to make sure that you have the following softwares installed on your system.

  • GMP, MPFR and MPC libraries, with the header files for the cross-tools
  • libxslt development version
  • Ruby (<= 1.8) and Rubygems (>= 1.3.1), including the development version. All recent (and decent) distro have now at least ruby 1.9.
  • popen4, term-ansicolor, OptionParser, and nokogiri gems. The gem program may not be available within ruby directly, so

    may be necessary.
    Some hack may be necessary for nokogiri, as the newer version demand ruby 1.9 and above. The web is your friend to find out how to deal with that if you do not want to upgrade ruby.

  • Bash or Zsh

Install the environment

Before using APES, you need to set several environment variables according to your system configuration.

The install.sh at the root of the sources can be used for this purpose, please update it according to your own environment.

The APES_ROOT variable must contain the PWD of your APES installation. The APES_COMPONENT_PATH behaves likes the PATH variable and contains a list of directories, separated with :, that gathers components. You can thereby have a global APES installation and multiple users can exports their own component repositories.

APES build system uses ruby and defines several libraries of which ruby must be aware. Hence, you need to extend RUBYLIB with the line above. Same things concerning the tools, your shell must be aware of their existence, so you need to extend your PATH with the lines above.

Prior to be able to build a kernel, it is necessary to build the cross-development tools for the target processor. As DNA/OS has been ported on MIPS, ARM, Microblaze, NIOSII and x86, refrain yourself you build the tools for sparc or powerpc. A patched version of the cross-dev tools is available through the SLSxtools git repositoy. As it is organized in submodules and contains several branches for different targets, the command line to fetch the right thing is:

If you arrived here even though you have an old git version, we rely on you to infer the set of git commands to issue to fetch the content of the dna-xtools branch of the repository.

The cross-dev environment needs the texinfo, bison and flexpackages (and fail with strange errors when compiling, not at configuration time unfortunately), so make sure you have them installed or install them before going further:

Once done, enter the SLSxtools directory and launch the script which stands there:

The first argument is the target processor, the second one the directory in which the compilation results should be place.
Now you are all set. Enjoy!