Building AltOS

The AltOS source tree has a fairly long list of build dependencies, because it builds firmware for a number of different processor cores, ground station software in Java, various utilities in C, documentation, etc. Because Bdale and Keith are both Debian GNU/Linux developers, by far the easiest way to build from source is to start with a Debian 'unstable' installation and take advantage of Debian tools and processes. From this platform, it is possible to build installable packages not only for Debian, but also for Windows, Mac OS X, and generic Linux.

To do this, install Debian, upgrade to 'unstable', then type 'apt build-dep altos' and all of the required build dependencies should be automatically installed.

Since many people prefer to use an actually released version of Debian, in October 2024 Bdale worked through the steps required to take a clean install of Debian 12 (bookworm) and get to a working build. Here's the resulting recipe:

  I installed a fresh Debian 12 (bookworm) minimal instance in a VM.

       # make sure we're on latest bookworm bits
       apt update && apt upgrade && apt autoremove

       # set up build dependencies, etc.  Note that libssl-dev and sox
       # are new build-deps added since the altos version released with
       # debian bookwork, so won't be pulled in by 'build-dep'
       apt install build-essential git libssl-dev sox
       apt build-dep altos

       git clone git://git.gag.com/fw/altos
       cd altos
       git checkout master
       ./autogen.sh
       make

       # That ran to successful build completion for me.

The notes we use to do a complete build for release are in the file Releasing in the root of the source tree. You do not need to follow these instructions to do a build for yourself, but since that document is likely to be kept up to date better than this one, feel free to check there for hints on things that might have changed, and/or feel free to reach out to us for help if you get stuck.