Getting Started With Linux on ST40 Installing the target Software

We described earlier how the easiest way to to install a Linux system on the host PC is to use a distribution. This is also true for the ST40 target system. Rather than invent our own distribution from scratch, we have decided to port the MontaVista HardHat™ distribution. MontaVista have chosen to use the term Cross Development Kit (CDK) to avoid confusion with the host distribution, so you may see this term also used in their documentation.

To start with, I suggest that you download the MontaVista HardHat™ Linux Cross Development Kit documentation. It'll give you something to read while you download the rest of the code! The LinuxSH pages on SourceForge also have a small amount of RPM documentation.

All the software you need to run Linux on the ST40 is provided in the form of RPMs. An RPM (Redhat Packager Manager) file is a single file which contains a complete application - namely a list of prerequisite packages which must already be installed, all the new files needed, and scripts which perform any additional configuration which is needed when the package is installed. It also contains uninstallation information should you ever wish to delete or upgrade the package. For more information, see www.rpm.org.

You can download the RPMs you need from one of two places. If you are connecting from inside the ST firewall, the fastest download is likely to come from mo.bri.st.com. Alternatively we also make the RPMS available from SourceForge, from linuxsh.sourceforge.net/pub/linuxsh. Look for the latest shrpm directory.

Note: For reasons I don't understand, when trying to follow the above link from inside the ST firewall, the web-proxy generates an error. If you hit this problem, an alternative route is to use the command line based FTP program and the FTP proxy. If this is the first time you have used the command line version, here are some brief instructions.

Which files you will need depends on exactly what you are intending to do. There are probably three common installations:

Minimal Installation

This uses the busybox application to provide all the system utilities. This is very useful in system where the size of the filesystem is limited (for example a ROM or RAM filesystems). For more details on BusyBox see the projects home page.

For this you will need:

hhl-sh4-filesystem
hhl-sh4-glibc
hhl-sh4-busybox
hhl-sh4-overdrive-lsp-binaries
st40load

If you later find that you need the full version of some applications, this is fine. You can install them as required, and any links to the busybox program will be overwritten for just those new applications. For example, the shell which is provided as part of busybox is lash, the 'lame' shell. When you're tight on memory this is ideal, but when running from an NFS mounted disk, space is not at the same premium, and so most people would choose to also install bash.

Full version

This installation uses the 'full' versions of various applications, and so has many more features, but takes more disk space and memory. In fact which programs are included here, and which are not, is largely a matter of preference, and what you will be doing with the target system. A comfortable set of packages would be:

hhl-sh4-filesystem
hhl-sh4-glibc
hhl-sh4-sysvinit
hhl-sh4-bash
hhl-sh4-diffutils
hhl-sh4-e2fsprogs
hhl-sh4-fileutils
hhl-sh4-findutils
hhl-sh4-ftp
hhl-sh4-gawk
hhl-sh4-grep
hhl-sh4-inetd
hhl-sh4-ldconfig
hhl-sh4-modutils
hhl-sh4-net-tools
hhl-sh4-ping
hhl-sh4-procps
hhl-sh4-psmisc
hhl-sh4-sed
hhl-sh4-sh-utils
hhl-sh4-tar
hhl-sh4-telnet
hhl-sh4-telnetd
hhl-sh4-termcap
hhl-sh4-textutils
hhl-sh4-util-linux
hhl-sh4-vi
hhl-sh4-overdrive-lsp-binaries
st40load

Development version

This is the same as either of the above versions, with the addition of the headerfiles, libraries and development tools needed to build and debug application programs:

hhl-sh4-gdb-server
hhl-sh4-kernel-headers
hhl-sh4-libtermcap
hhl-sh4-gdb-client
hhl-sh4-binutils
hhl-sh4-gcc

Note that the last three of these are host programs, and so are in the i386 directory rather than noarch.

Installing the RPMs

Once you have downloaded the RPMs, you can start following the Installing The CDK chapter in the HardHat documentation. Obviously you will have downloaded the RPM's rather than having them on a CD, so where the instructions tell you to mount a CD, simply ignore it, and use the directory where you downloaded the RPM's instead.

Note: the HardHat installation instructions imply that you can install the RPMs in any order. However we have had some problems doing this, and recommend that you always install the filesystems RPM first.

As the SuperH development occurred after the last CDK release was made, some of the version numbers will be later than that mentioned in the documentation. In particular the kernel number will be later. Associated with the kernel is a Linux Support Package (LSP), which contains the configuration files for each board. We are supplying the following LSPs:

You will also need to set a couple of environment variables to make sure the tools are accessible. If you are using a shell which is compatible with the Bourne shell (sh, ash, bash, ksh, zsh etc.):

ST40ROOT=/opt/hardhat/st40load
export ST40ROOT
PATH=/opt/hardhat/devkit/sh/sh4/bin:$ST40ROOT/bin:$PATH

Or if you are using a C shell style shell (csh, tcsh etc.):

setenv ST40ROOT /opt/hardhat/st40load
path=(/opt/hardhat/devkit/sh/sh4/bin $ST40ROOT/bin $path)

You may want to put these commands into the appropriate start up scripts to avoid having to re-type them.