The BuildRoot environment

​BuildRoot is a ​build system. It helps you to manage and create a complete GNU/Linux system from scratch automatically.

The main role of a build system is:

• Compile software source code
• Manage packages (software)
• Deploy software to a platform
• (optionally) Test software code
• (optionally) Generate documentation

During this module, you will only use a very small part of what a build system is capable of. However, it is sufficient to build a large variety of embedded systems.

This page contains documentation for setting up and using BuildRoot.

Installation

The installation makes the hypothesis you are on a GNU system (e.g. GNU/Linux) with utilities like make, flex, bison, gcc...

Open a terminal,

1) Setup the working directory

In the home directory, type:

developer@debian-rpi:~$ mkdir -p work/sources

1) Get the BuildRoot software

developer@debian-rpi:~$ cd work/sources
developer@debian-rpi:~/work/sources$ wget http://buildroot.uclibc.org/downloads/buildroot-2013.11.tar.bz2

2) Uncompress the archive

developer@debian-rpi:~/work/sources$ tar xvf buildroot-2013.11.tar.bz2 -C ~/work

This will uncompress the archive in the directory ~/work/buildroot-2013.11. BuildRoot? is installed now. You can use it to build a first simple system.

3) Go to the BuildRoot directory and prepare it for build a basic GNU/Linux system for the Raspberry-Pi

developer@debian-rpi:~/work/buildroot-2013.11$ make menuconfig