A friend of mine asked me if I would like to try out developing stuff in NetBSD
and I thought why not.
As with most things the first step you take towards participation in the
development of a system is to try to build the system. And my frist attempt to
do this was to download the source code from the NetBSD-current tree and give it
a spin.
Unfortunately without any direct access to proper hardware to compile on, I had
to restrict myself to the realms of a VirtualBox instance. The instructions on
the NetBSD website were quite clear and I followed it, giving my frist attempt
to build the NetBSD from it’s source.
Since the VirtualBox instance did not have much resources, it took it’s sweet
time to compile roughly 13 hours and luckly I did not have to face any powerloss
inbetween so I could complete the whole build without any interrupts.
Here is the output of the build.sh
log
make release started at: Mon Sep 8 15:12:28 IST 2014
make release finished at: Wed Sep 10 03:08:29 IST 2014
===> Successful make release
===> build.sh ended: Wed Sep 10 03:08:29 IST 2014
===> Summary of results:
build.sh command: ./build.sh -T ../tooldir -D ../destdir -R ../releasedir -O ../objdir -U -r release
build.sh started: Mon Sep 8 15:11:31 IST 2014
NetBSD version: 7.99.1
MACHINE: i386
MACHINE_ARCH: i386
Build platform: NetBSD 6.1 i386
HOST_SH: /bin/sh
No $TOOLDIR/bin/nbmake, needs building.
Bootstrapping nbmake
MAKECONF file: /etc/mk.conf (File not found)
TOOLDIR path: /home/fox/project/netbsd-current/src/../tooldir
DESTDIR path: /home/fox/project/netbsd-current/src/../destdir
RELEASEDIR path: /home/fox/project/netbsd-current/src/../releasedir
Removing /home/fox/project/netbsd-current/src/../tooldir
Removing /home/fox/project/netbsd-current/src/../destdir
Created /home/fox/project/netbsd-current/src/../tooldir/bin/nbmake
Updated makewrapper: /home/fox/project/netbsd-current/src/../tooldir/bin/nbmake-i386
Successful make release
build.sh ended: Wed Sep 10 03:08:29 IST 2014
===> .
But this was no where near in getting to write actual code. But none the less
this was the first step.