= The !BuildRoot environment =

[http://buildroot.uclibc.org BuildRoot] is a [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Build_automation 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
}}}