Installing BrickOS

So far I have installed BrickOS under both Windows 2000 and Windows XP and tried to figure out what you need to do under various flavors of Linux. Here's what I found:

Windows 2000

I followed the instructions for installing BrickOS under Cygwin, and it worked first time (once I learnt to type "srec" not "serc" and "l" (letter "el") not "1" (number 1) :-).

I haven't tried to connect it up to BricxCC, being a confirmed text-editor-and-command-line type; it works great like that BTW.

Windows XP

I tried just reusing the instructions for installing BrickOS under Cygwin, and found that using the default settings when downloading Cygwin failed to install lots of necessary stuff (like gcc and make).

So I went back and just hit "all" when the Cygwin installation asks you to select packages, and then it worked, which is simple, but uses up a big chunk of hard drive, and takes a pretty long time to download.

Of course you can also do it the smart way and look at the list of required packages as well.

Finally, note that for some XP setups you have to manually add c:/cygwin/bin to the PATH environment variable. Otherwise when you try to run the script buildgcc.sh things like make can't be found by the system.

Windows related problems

My experience seems to have been something of a fluke.

Several people in the class had serious problems installing BrickOS under both 2000 and XP, but there seem to be ways to fix them.

One set of problems seem to be caused by the Cygwin installation not including (or being able to find) the newlib library, and manifests itself in a series of errors concerning missing header files when running buildgcc.sh.
A fix for this (thanks to Dmitry Ivolgin and Jinzhing Niu) is to download newlib-1.8.2.tar.gz, to save it into the same directory as gcc and binutils, and then run a modified version of buildgcc.sh
Another set of errors (reported and fixed by Sumon Azhar) is the failure to build the cross compiler. He suggests downloading his collection brickos.rar into the build directory, and unpacking with winrar.
The collection includes a newer version of gcc, newlib, and the cross compiler for the Hitachi processor in the RCX, so this route allows you to avoid having to do most of the building.
Finally, information from Orit Gruber suggests that the problem (and in particular the intermittant nature of the problem) is due to different mirror sites having subtly different versions of Cygwin.
This version apparently works okay.

Linux/OSX

If you use Debian, you seem to be sorted.

There's some suggestion (in the howto) that there are RPMs for Red Hat users, but I haven't tried to track them down (yet). I know that there are issues getting the IR transmitters to run under Linux, and I'm delaying the pain until I have more time.

If you want to do an install from scratch, it shouldn't be too hard. From what I have seen of the build script that comes with the Cygwin installation, all installation requires is a reasonably recent version of gcc, so if you rewrite the script to set up the relevant paths or run the instructions by hand, everything should run fine.

In theory of course :-)