Required software

NOTE: This page has been identified as having content that is significantly out-of-date, usually because it refers to OpenEmbedded-Classic - for new projects, you should use OpenEmbedded-Core. See OpenEmbedded Wiki Update Project for more details.

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 (2.6.x or 2.7.x for latest development version of bitbake)
  • Important: Python 3 is not supported. If you are using Python 3 you will need to ensure Python 2 is installed and that /usr/bin/env python invokes python2
  • 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.
• Python-ply PLY is an implementation of lex and yacc for

Python

• python-progressbar This library provides a text mode progressbar for python.
• 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)
• 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.