Dextrose/Building

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Dextrose build system

Dextrose uses olpc-os-builder, a tool create by OLPC to build official and customized system images. The Dextrose git repository contains, olpc-os-builder, local customizations specific to Dextrose, and fixes and enhancements waiting to be pushed upstream.

Build host requirements

The Dextrose build system is known to work on Fedora 14 x86_64 and Fedora 16 x86_64. The OS on the host system shouldn't matter because the build runs in a chroot environment. olpc-os-builder does not yet run on Ubuntu due to a missing dependency (bitfrost).

The initial build requires about 700MB of rpm packages and Sugar activity bundles. The packages and bundles are cached for futures builds.

Initial setup

If sudo isn't configured to work with your account, add yourself to the wheel group. Alternatively, you can become root with su -.

Install build dependencies (you need to be root to do this)

 yum upgrade
 yum install libtomcrypt-devel bitfrost crcimg make gcc mtd-utils python-imgcreate zip unzip zlib-devel lzma

Install the olpc-bootanim-tools package:

 rpm -i http://download.sugarlabs.org/dextrose/testing/dx3/rpms/x86_64/os/olpc-bootanim-tools-2.14-1.bernie1.fc16.x86_64.rpm

If you have a 32bit machine:

 rpm -i http://download.sugarlabs.org/dextrose/testing/dx3/rpms/i386/os/olpc-bootanim-tools-2.14-1.bernie1.fc16.i686.rpm

Alternatively, you could rebuild the olpc-bootanim package from source:

 yum install rpm-build netpbm-progs
 wget http://download.sugarlabs.org/dextrose/testing/dx3/rpms/source/olpc-bootanim-2.14-1.bernie1.fc16.src.rpm
 rpmbuild --rebuild olpc-bootanim-2.14-1.bernie1.fc16.src.rpm
 rpm -U ~/rpmbuild/RPMS/*/olpc-bootanim-tools-*.rpm

Checkout the Dextrose build system

 git clone git://git.sugarlabs.org/dextrose/mainline.git dextrose

Compile build helper programs

 cd dextrose
 make

Generate initial sequence number for the builds (42 is just an example)

 echo 42 >buildnr-dx

Creating a build

Become root and run the build system:

 time sudo ./osbuilder.py config/dextrose3-xo1-nognome.ini

The initial build may take several hours, depending on available bandwidth. Subsequent builds will take about 15-20 minutes on average desktop machines.

Upon completion, the new image will be available in build/output. Now copy it on a USB stick and test it on your target.

Debugging

Because several build tools (olpc-os-builder, imgcreate and yum) run chrooted and nested into each other, error output is often obscure or misleading. Before digging into the code, try asking on IRC in case someone has already seen the same problem.

Publishing the images

Please do not publish signed builds unless they implement the OLPC anti-theft system.

Customizing your build

olpc-os-builder is documented at README in the olpc-os-builder tree. The modules are documented in README files in the modules directory.

Upstream Code

Dextrose is based on [[1]] by Daniel Drake. You can fetch the latest source code into your Dextrose repository:

git remote add olpc git://dev.laptop.org/projects/olpc-os-builder
git fetch olpc
git log olpc/master

Customizing the core RPMs

Go to the rpms/PACKAGENAME in the dextrose tree

Edit the spec file. Typically this involves adding a new patch, which is done by adding a PatchNN: tag and a corresponding %patchNN rule in %setup. Some of the intricacies of RPM spec files are unveiled in the Fedora Packaging Guidelines.

Increase the release number after each change.

building the Custom RPM

If you have a Fedora 11 i386 system, just type:

 make i586

Otherwise, you need to build in a mock chroot:

 make srpm
 sudo mock -r fedora-11-i386 --resultdir=. --rebuild mypackage.src.rpm

Uploading the Custom RPM

Upload rpm to a yum repository and add it to the ini file used by the OLPC OS builder.

To automate this step, we have a rule make uploadrpm which points at the Dextrose repository. Edit rpms/common/Makefile.common or rpms/common/uploadrpm to retarget this rule to your repository.

Building custom kernels

$ git clone http://dev.laptop.org/git/olpc-2.6/
$ cd olpc-2.6
$ setarch i386 make ARCH=i386 xo_1-kernel-rpm

Resources

Dextrose VM hosted by treehouse

Sugar-jhbuild - The Sugar build system

RPM - The Red Hat package manager

Fedora packaging - Fedora packaging workflow and conventions

createrepo - the yum package repositories builder

ASLO - The Sugar Labs Activities Library

General understanding of the Linux system plumbing infrastructure: kernel,

udev, dbus, DeviceKit, NetworkManager, Xorg...

Flashing laptops and debugging any problems

Interaction with the Sugar and OLPC community to solve issues and minimize our divergence from the official builds.