Required software

OpenEmbedded's Software Requirements

This page is the reference of what software is needed. But OEandYourDistro is likely much faster in getting you that software actually installed. A script for Ubuntu is provided.

To use the OE build system the following software is required on your system:

• Python (Version 2.5.0 or 2.6.x for latest development version of bitbake)
  • Note that you may also need certain development files for Python e.g. for bitbake's setup.py to work. Depending on the distribution you use you may want to look for a package called "python-dev", "python-devel", or similar.
• GNU Patch (Version 2.5.9 or later, see ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/diffutils/ . It is a "testing release" and is not mirrored on the GNU mirrors.)
• GNU m4
• GNU make (Version 3.80 or later for hh.org kernels)
• Psyco JIT Compiler is recommended to increase performance (32bit only)
• perl (needs newer than 5.0, how much newer? probably at least 5.6.2)
• diffstat
• bitbake

Tools to download source files

• wget
• curl
• ftp
• cvs
• subversion
• git
• mercurial (for some recipes)

Tools to verify integrity of the downloaded sources

• md5sum
• sha256sum

Tools to unpack sources

• tar
• bzip2
• gzip
• unzip

Tools to build the various *-doc packages

• Jade or OpenJade
  • I don't know which of these is preferred
• Docbook DTDs and DSSSL stylesheets
• sgmltools, called "sgmltools-lite" too
• docbook-utils
  • docbook-utils download is hard to find; look in ftp://sources.redhat.com/pub/docbook-tools/new-trials/SOURCES
• Texinfo
• texi2html (Perl script that converts Texinfo to HTML)

Other packages

• GNU sed 4.x
• Bison
• bc (binary calculator), if you want to build a Zaurus 2.4 or any of the collie kernels
• glibc headers (libc6-dev in Debian, glibc-devel in RPM based (in PLD also glibc-static is needed))
• pcre headers (Perl 5 Compatible Regular Expression Library, required for e.g. konqueror-embedded)
• SDL headers to build qemu-native (apt-get install libsdl1.2-dev under Ubuntu/Debian)
• mktemp (required by quilt and used in some package patches)
• help2man - Create simple man pages from --help output
• gawk - Text Processing Tool
• chrpath - change the rpath or runpath in binaries

There is an ongoing effort to accurately document the required software within the OpenEmbedded and ultimately, this will be reflected in the ASSUME_PROVIDED variable.