| Obtaining and installing a Midipix distribution |
| =============================================== |
| |
| A Midipix distribution consists of the following: |
| * the native Midipix toolchain, consisting of perk, gcc, its dependencies, |
| and binutils, |
| * musl, a lightweight, fast, simple, and free libc[1] used by Midipix, |
| * the Midipix runtime components that bridge the gap between the libc and the |
| executive subsystems of all Windows NT-derived Windows OS starting with and |
| including Windows XP, and |
| * a steadily increasing number of 3rd party open source packages, as expected in |
| any modern POSIX-compliant *nix environment, including GNU coreutils, shells, |
| libraries such as ncurses, libressl, as well as Perl and Python. |
| |
| Compressed Midipix distribution tarballs and, separately, source tarballs are, |
| at present, produced every four (4) hours UTC after each successful build and |
| subsequently signed. This process is fully automated by a portable Bourne shell |
| script; all of the above mentioned components are cross-compiled. |
| |
| Thus, the most hassle-free way to get started with Midipix is to simply download |
| the most recent distribution tarball and follow the instructions below. It is, |
| however, recommended to anyone intending to use Midipix as a development platform |
| to familiarise themselves with the build process. Other reasons to prefer building |
| a Midipix distribution yourself include integrating new 3rd party software or local |
| runtime component patches. At present, a full build from scratch, excluding tarballs, |
| takes between 1 and 2 hours to finish on an 8-core Xeon 3.5 GHz host. |
| The build script can be obtained from the following GitHub repository: <https://github.com/lalbornoz/midipix_build>. |
| |
| If you obtained a Midipix distribution tarball, extract it into a directory and |
| drive of your choice, henceforth referred to as target directory; the drive can |
| be a network drive. |
| If you built Midipix yourself, the target directory is equivalent to the ${PREFIX} |
| configured in build.vars, which defaults to ${HOME}/midipix. |
| |
| Previously, this repository contained a shell script for usage within Cygwin |
| and a VBS script in order to obtain a Midipix shell environment. These have been |
| replaced with <https://git.midipix.org/cgit.cgi/mpackage/plain/distro/bash.cmd> |
| from the Midipix distro skeleton[2]. In that respect, and as a general rule, |
| midipix_build provides all the bits needed for (cross-)building the framework |
| along with the entire collection of third-party software packages, whereas |
| mpackage's task is to create a live execution environment (midipix-on-the-fly, |
| or mxfly), optionally including with it a set of tarballs for the installation |
| of a custom, midipix-based distribution. |
| |
| References: |
| * Sun, 24 Apr 2016 09:04:08 +0000 [1] musl FAQ <http://www.musl-libc.org/faq.html> |
| * Mon, 14 May 2018 17:15:26 +0000 [2] <https://git.midipix.org/cgit.cgi/mpackage/plain/README> |
| |
| Linux distribution-related errata |
| ================================= |
| |
| Busybox based distributions need the gawk, gsed, and coreutils packages to build perl. |