Developing in a Native Host OS

On all platforms, we recommend using the included Vagrant configuration to get compiling as quickly as possible with a Linux virtual machine (VM).

If you are an advanced developer and you want to compile in your host OS, we may have support for it. Beware tha there are number of dependencies and we’ve found it finicky to replicate on the huge variety of possible configurations. Unless you have a compelling reason not to, we strongly recommend using Vagrant.

The dependencies can be installed using the included bootstrap.sh shell script. The script officially supports and is tested regularly in:

  • Ubuntu Linux 13.04 - 14.04
  • Arch Linux

and it has unofficial support (i.e. it’s been tested, but not regularly) for:

  • Mac OS X Mavericks
  • Cygwin in Windows. We’ve found Cygwin can be a huge pain to get consistently set up, so we strongly discourage you from using it unless you are an expert in debugging Cygwin-specific problems.

Even if you already use Linux, we still recommend using Vagrant to set up a VM. The huge variety of Linux installations means that it’s often much more pleasant to use the Vagrant VM which has a stable, repeatable setup.

Pre-requisites

Follow the steps in Development Environment Setup to install Git and clone the vi-firmware repository.

Cygwin Pre-Setup

Compiling natively in Windows (e.g. at a Windows Command Prompt) is not supported. Cygwin (32-bit) is unofficially supported, but is no longer recommended. You’ll be much happier using Vagrant, promise!

If you still wish to use Cygwin, download 32-bit version of Cygwin (even if you’re on 64-bit Windows) and run the installer - during the installation process, select these packages:

make, git, gcc-core, patchutils, unzip, python, check, curl, libsasl2, python-setuptools

After it’s installed, open a new Cygwin terminal and configure it to ignore Windows-style line endings in scripts by running this command:

$ set -o igncr && export SHELLOPTS

Bootstrap

Run the bootstrap.sh script:

$ cd vi-firmware
vi-firmware/ $ script/bootstrap.sh

If there were no errors, you are ready to compile. If there are errors, try to follow the recommendations in the error messages. You may need to manually install the dependencies if your environment is not in a predictable state. If you’re stuck, you might seriously consider using Vagrant!