Obtaining

If you are reading this file from your disk, chances are you managed to get the software already. However if you are reading this on our webpages, it might still be unclear.

The easiest thing to do is simply download the latest tarball from the project page.

Alternately, you can get Iguana directly from our version control repository.

Making sure you have all the tools

Before you get started you will want to make sure you have all the tools you need. This is described in detail on our required tools page. Basically you need Python, SCons, gcc and a simulator. You probably need to use gcc-3.3 (see the required tools page for details).

Building

For the impatient:

$ scons machine=pc99

For a more extensive discussion of the scons based build system, see the build system pages.

Note that you always need to tell the build system what machine you want to compile for. We support a lot of IA32 (x86), MIPS and ARM targets, which are described in more detail on our supported machines page.

At this point, either scons built Iguana successfully, or it all crashed in a big heap of error messages. In the latter case the problem might be something simple to diagnose, (maybe you didn't install your cross compiler correctly) or it might be something a lot more complicated. In any case, feel free to ask for help on our mailing list, kenge-users@ertos.nicta.com.au.

Assuming everything has just worked up to now, you should have a bootable image that you can now run. Exactly what kind of bootable image you have depends on what your target is. For example, on ia32 it will be a FAT filesystem image with grub installed on it. If your target is an ARM embedded board then you probably have an ELF file that can be loaded by your bootloader.

Running

Again for the impatient:

$ scons machine=pc99 simulate

This requires you to have a supported simulator, see the supported simulators page for more information on the supported simulators and their usage.

By specifying the simulate target you get the build system to start up the simulator with all the appropriate flags and configurations for the chosen platform.

The simulated system should boot up Pistachio, then Iguana, then Wombat in sequence, and finally drop into a shell running in the virtual system.

You can also build and run a number of other examples (see the examples directory), for instance:

$ scons machine=pc99 example=naming simulate

This example should load a simple test of the naming system, which should hopefully print that a number of tests passed, and finally conclude that the naming system works.