Building for Debian
Contents
Introduction
Ultibo core is currently made available as a Windows installer download as well as various Windows tools, however there is nothing specific about the source code or modifications to Free Pascal that are dependent on Windows and some may choose to use it on other platforms such as Linux or Mac. While we are currently unable to provide prepackaged installations for Linux in the form of DEB or RPM files we have created a set of instructions for building the necessary items from source in order to provide similar functionality to the Windows platform.
Please note that because these instructions require you to build all of the components from source and possibly install additional packages onto your Linux installation you should be familiar with using the command line and confident with the tools available. These instructions are fully tested and proven to work, however we cannot provide support for individual cases if you experience issues in completing the steps below.
Prerequisites
The instructions below detail the process of building the modified Free Pascal compiler, the Free Pascal ARM cross compiler and the Ultibo RTL in order to create a working configuration that allows developing Ultibo applications.
This process was tested and developed using Debian Wheezy 7.6 for i386 with Linux kernel version 3.2.0 however the requirements for FreePascal are relatively simple so these instructions should work without much change on later versions of Debian (eg Jessie) and should also be able to be translated easily to many other distributions.
In order to avoid any conflict with official FPC releases these instructions install all components into a folder within your home directory, if you follow these instructions the Ultibo version of Free Pascal as well as the RTL and sources will be located in the $HOME/ultibo/core folder.
Compiling the Ultibo edition of Free Pascal requires using the official 3.0.0 release version as the starting point, these instructions will NOT work if you start with version 2.6.4 or any other version. Fortunately the FPC team provide a precompiled download of FPC 3.0.0 which can be obtained from the download page and installed using the provided instructions.
If you prefer not to install the official 3.0.0 release (you may have other projects that depend on an earlier version for example) then you can get a fully working installation of Free Pascal 3.0.0 by following the instructions at GetLazarus.org which will by default install a working copy in the folder $HOME/Development/FreePascal that can be deleted later if you choose.
Building Free Pascal (Ultibo Edition)
Installing the arm-none-eabi Toolchain
Building the FPC Cross Compiler
Building the Ultibo RTL
Creating the Configuration files
