HowTo Build NST 18

Building NST 18

The following page provides details on building the NST 18 yum repository and ISO images directly from source code. The procedure boils down to the following steps:

• Setting up a development machine.
• Checking out copy of the source code.
• Installing the necessary packages to build.
• Building the yum repository and ISO image.

Setting Up A Development Machine

In order to set up a development machine, you will need to download either the 32 bit or 64 bit Live Installable version of Fedora 18 (http://fedoraproject.org/get-fedora). Choose the 32 bit version if you want to build the 32 bit version of NST and choose the 64 bit version if you want to build the 64 bit version of NST. If you want to build both a 32 bit version and 64 bit version of the NST, you will need to set up two development machines.

You can use a virtual environment as your development machines. If you do this, I'd recommend allocated at least 2GB of RAM and 40 GB of disk space and two CPUs. Even though it takes longer to build within a virtual environment, I find that the convenience is typically worth it. I typically use VirtualBox (https://www.virtualbox.org/) for my personal builds. The NST project uses VMware (http://www.vmware.com/) environments for nightly test builds.

Be aware that there are parts of the build process which require root access. Because of this, it is recommended that you set up a dedicated machine for NST development.

Regardless of whether you are using real hardware or virtual hardware, after you install Fedora 18, make sure you do the following:

• Update the /etc/sudo file such that your account (or wheel group) can run the sudo command without being prompted for a password (NOTE: you can skip this step if you will be using the root account).

sudo visudo

• Update all of the packages on the system:

sudo yum update

• Reboot the system to load the newest kernel:

sudo reboot

• Install/update any device drivers for you hardware or virtual environment.
• Make sure that the subversion package is installed.

sudo yum install subversion 

• Reboot the system to make sure the device drivers load properly.

sudo reboot

Check Out The Source Code

Once you have your Fedora 18 development machine set up, you can check out a copy of the NST source code. It is recommended that you check out the repo area from subversion as this is the active area that is kept up to date.

The following commands will check out a copy of the repo area to the $HOME/repo directory on your system:

cd $HOME
svn checkout http://svn.code.sf.net/p/nst/code/repo repo

It may take a bit, but the above should get a current copy of what we are currently using to build the current version of the NST distribution.