Building Symmetry

Introduction

If you make any changes to the source code of Symmetry, you will need to compile and link it to be able to run the new version. Symmetry’s makefile can also make a bootable CD that can either be run in an emulator like VirtualBox, Bochs or VMware, or burnt onto a CD to try on your computer.

Prerequisites

To build Symmetry, you need the following:

  • GCC version 4.1 or greater
  • NASM
  • GNU Binutils
  • GNU Make
  • GNU Tar
  • Git (optional)

Building a CD image will require mkisofs.

Downloading the Source

You can download the Symmetry source code from our Git repository at Gitorious. To do this, enter the following command:

git clone http://git.gitorious.org/sos/mainline.git

If you do not have Git, you can just download the most recent source package on the Downloads page.

Configuring the Image directory

For the install target in the makefile to work, you will need to make sure that the image directory in the kernel folder contains the folder System and System/Kernel.

Building the Code

The following command compiles and assembles the source files, and then links them into a binary. To build the it, navigate to the kernel directory of your working copy of Symmetry with your terminal, and then the command:

make

Generating a CD image

To generate a cd image, enter the following into your terminal, after completing the previous step.

make install

Cleaning Up

Once the Symmetry build has finished, you can remove all the object files and binaries that the build process created. To remove these, simply run:

make clean