DC DEV LINUX DISTRO

[Neoblast]

Since many people have contacted me due to the fact that they could not set up the toolchain and compile environment on linux, I think it could be a good idea to make a linux or mini linux distribution ( maybe livecd or not ) prepared to compile dc stuff just as is, with everything included...

What do you think guys?

[BlackAura]

A remaster of an Ubuntu LiveCD would probably be the easiest bet. I think you'd need to build .deb packages of the toolchain so the LiveCD builder will include them, but it probably wouldn't be that hard.

I think this idea came up before, and it seemed like a good idea, but LiveCDs were very difficult to build or modify at the time. It probably stands a better chance of working now.

[Ayla]

Hello everyone,

I think L@ Cible already made one. You should ask him.

[Sir Savant]

If someone made a deb of the things needed, I could easily make an Ubuntu LiveCD for this purpose and host it myself. I don't know exactly what is useful (last time I fooled with it I just downloaded that pack in the forums) so I don't know what to compile where.

Any takers?

[Neoblast]

well a rpm/deb would be good. Anyone up for it? I could help

[BlackAura]

I could probably give some of it a go, but I'm not sure what packages we'd actually need.

At a bare minimum, we're going to need at least SH-4 binutils, GCC and newlib, ARM binutils and GCC, dc-tool serial, and dc-tool IP. On top of that, we also need KOS, and probably some other tools (MC's scrambler, and IP.BIN builder, for example).

I wouldn't have a clue what to do about debuggers, IDEs, or any of the other tools on the Windows CD images.

[emptythought]

dc-chain has Insight and GDB implemented in them now so check that out. FYI, Insight will also compile GDB.

I'd put a C version of my CodeBlocks configurator up but I don't know the language well enough yet. CodeBlocks 8.02 uses XML to save the compiler settings and stuff and would need an XML library but like I said, C is still a new language to me. If anyone wants it to create a C version, I can upload my CodeBlocks wizard script and all the info needed to automate the process of manually adding the DC compiler.

The only other useful stuff (off the top of my head) is bmp2vmu which converts bitmaps into VMU save icons and eyecatchs (I could try to get speud to release a linux version), all of my DC tools from my site, emulators, Bin Checker (a linux version is available), and a couple other things.

Also, if you'd like, I could upload just the third party libraries that aren't in KOS so the .dep has the same libraries as the dev ISO.

[henzenmann]

I also have tried to build .debs for dc-chain. I have added "DESTDIR" capability to the Makefile, left the config/build sections in debian/rules empty and put all the actual calls to "make" into the install section of debian/rules.

It always fails when building the first-pass sh-elf-gcc because it seems to use the System's "as" instead of the freshly built one. This might be because of the DESTDIR stuff. One may have to split the packages up in order to get that bootstrapping process working (or look at other Debian crosscompiler packages as a reference). I will see if I can get it to work later today.

An easier solution would be to just create binary tarballs (like we had before) and convert them via "alien".

[BlackAura]

For Linux, the CodeBlocks IDE configuration tool would probably be better written in Python or something similar. It has a built-in XML library, and is a hell of a lot simpler to do this kind of stuff in.

Depending on how the CodeBlocks config files work, it might be possible to just include a pre-configured setup as a separate CodeBlocks DC Support package, with hard-coded paths to the compilers installed by the DC compilers package.

[emptythought]

Depending on how the CodeBlocks config files work, it might be possible to just include a pre-configured setup as a separate CodeBlocks DC Support package, with hard-coded paths to the compilers installed by the DC compilers package.

You mean just make a .deb or something, including the CodeBlocks config file pre-configured with the DC compiler settings and CodeBlocks? I don't understand 100%.

[BlackAura]

Yeah, pretty much. We'll know in advance where all the toolchain files are, so we can just pre-configure everything.

[emptythought]

Yeah, pretty much. We'll know in advance where all the toolchain files are, so we can just pre-configure everything.

Here's a freshly pre-configured default.conf.

dcscripts.zip has the DC project files but I forgot to change them to look for "Dreamcast sh-elf" rather than "Dreamcast sh-elf (dependent)." On Windows, they go in C:\Program Files\CodeBlocks\share\CodeBlocks\templates\wizard but I can't find the template folder on Linux. Also on Windows C:\Program Files\CodeBlocks\share\CodeBlocks\templates\wizard\config.script needs to be edited so the DC scripts are registered.

Code: Select all

    //
    // project wizards
    //
    RegisterWizard(wizProject,     _T("dreamcast"),    _T("Dreamcast application"), _T("Dreamcast"));
    RegisterWizard(wizProject,     _T("empty"),        _T("Empty project"),         _T("Console"));

It looks in /usr/local/dc for the kos with with kos and kos-ports subfolders and sh-elf.

[Neoblast]

The perfect linux distro to make this is slax
www.slax.org

Pretty, "easy" to use and customisable...