Setting up a cygwin Rockbox development environment

LinusNielsenFeltzing has created precompiled Cygwin packages for the SH-1, 68K/Coldfire and ARM cross GCC tools.

Warning:

New and inexperienced users may find the brief outline on this page insufficient to get up and running. If so, try the CygwinInstallWithScreenShots page

Step 1: Download the cygwin installer

Go to the cygwin home page, www.cygwin.com and download setup.exe from there ("Install or update now!").

Step 2: Install the base development environment

Run the setup.exe you just downloaded. If you are unsure about the questions asked by the installer, just choose the default, until you get to package selection. That bit is important.

Step 2.1: Package selection.

When you are asked to select the packages to install, select the following : (Make sure you leave the selection for "Base" untouched)

• Archive - zip
• Archive - unzip
• Devel - binutils
• Devel - gcc
• Devel - gcc-mingw-core
• Devel - gdb (if you want to debug simulator code)
• Devel - make
• Devel - mingw-runtime
• Devel - patchutils
• Devel - subversion
• Editors - nano (to change the cross compiler path)
• Interpreters - perl
• Text - tetex-base (if you want to build the manual)
• Text - tetex-extra (if you want to build the manual)

Step 3: Select the Rockbox mirror site and install

Start the Setup program again. When the installer prompts you for a mirror site URL, enter http://download.rockbox.org/cygwin/ in the "User URL" field and click "Add".

Select the packages you need. We suggest you select all of them, since you will be needing them when test compiling your code for all Rockbox targets. They should be listed as follows:

• Devel - sdl (for the uisimulator)
• Devel - m68k-elf-binutils
• Devel - m68k-elf-gcc
• Devel - sh-elf-binutils
• Devel - sh-elf-gcc
• Devel - arm-elf-binutils
• Devel - arm-elf-gcc

Step 4: Add the cross-compiler directory to your path

To successfully compile Rockbox, the cross compiler directory has to be in your path. This is automatically done by the installation script, but if that fails for some reason, there are a couple ways of doing so, here's one:

Edit using nano or vi (not Notepad or Wordpad in Windows) /etc/profile and add ":/opt/sh/bin:/opt/m68k/bin:/opt/arm/bin" (without the quotation marks) to the end of the line that says:

     PATH=/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/X11R6/bin...

     PATH=/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/X11R6/bin:/opt/sh/bin:/opt/m68k/bin:/opt/arm/bin:$PATH

An alternative way is to temporarily tell the compiler to accept commands from your build directory (where you wish to build rockbox). This can be done by typing the following into cygwin, after navigating to your build directory

export PATH=/usr/local/arm-elf/bin:$PATH

Done. Happy hacking!

Related links

For further instructions about compiling rockbox with Cygwin, see the SimpleGuideToCompiling page.