On the 19th May 2007, Castle Technology Ltd published the license document for the release into the public domain of the RISC OS sources. In support of this, RISC OS Open (ROOL have published the first batch of source code and a binary build environment (BBE) with which to build these sources.
As a developer or if you’re just curious, your first questions will probably be:
This page will attempt to guide you through the answers to these questions. As more sources are released, the answers will probably change so if you run into problems, take a look back here because this page may have been updated.
First things first, you will need to download the two archives from our downloads page called ‘bbe.tar.bz2’ and ‘sources.tar.bz2’ (we also released an archive called gpl.tar.bz2 but you don’t need to download this).
To extract the contents of these archives on a RISC OS machine, you will need a tool like bzip2. You can download this from a site such as riscos.info
(note: you want the second bzip2 download, version 1.0.2-2). You should install the bzip2 tool somewhere on your run path, for example by copying it into !Boot.Library.
Extract the tar file from the bzipped archive using the a command like:
bzip2 -d bbe/tar/bz2This should decompress the archive and leave you with a tar file. The contents should be unpacked using something like SparkFS. There are various settings which you need to have set up correctly to untar these files but that should be covered in the SparkFS documentation.
(Basically, we created the archives on a SuSE Linux machine onto which we had put the files using Sunfish. This means that the files might have a ,xxx suffix which indicates the filetype. Various untar tools for RISC OS might handle this correctly, but others might not.)
If you decompress and untar the archives on a Linux/UNIX system, you should have no problems copying them over onto your RISC OS machine using something like NFS (e.g. Sunfish).
Now you should have a directory called RiscOS which contains all of the dearchived sources (when you unpack the sources.tar archive) and another directory called RiscOS which contains the BBE (when you unpack the bbe.tar archive).
These can be combined, or simply unpacked into the same directory in order to ensure that the sources reside within the BBE, e.g. the RiscOS directory will contain something like:
If you look inside the Sources directory, you should see various directories containing the sources to a number of RISC OS components:
Finally, you need to install the main build tools and header files from your C/C\\ installation into the build. These are a commercial product so if you do not own a recent copy of these tools, drop an email to us? and we’ll advise you on how to buy them.
Assuming you have the C/C\\ tools installed on your RISC OS machine (you will have a directory somewhere called AcornC/C\\) we have provided a couple of scripts which do the installation for you.
Make sure your machine has “seen” the AcornC/C\\ installation (run the !SetPaths application within that directory) and then run both of our scripts:
RiscOS/Library/InstallTools RiscOS/Export/InstallCLibthis only needs to be done once.
Before you build something, you need to ensure that the desktop environment is suitable for your build process.
One thing we have found which helps is to ensure that image filing systems like StrongHelp and SparkFS are not running as this can cause problems if files such as StrongHelp manuals or zip archives are involved in the building of a given component. Most of the time, you will not need to do this but if you see things like *copy operations failing, this might be the reason.
Another thing which helps is to avoid having thing doing periodic disc activity during building a component (e.g. fetching email) especially if that activity includes setting the currently selected directory (CSD).