@@ -816,24 +816,29 @@ was laid out provide very good examples of how to make things easier for both
the distributor and the purchaser of the hardware containing GPLed components.
\section{Root Filesystem and Kernel Compilation}
* We found a CD included in the box that the ThinkPenguin TPE-NWIFIROUTER
shipped in, labelled "libreCMC v1.2.1 source code". On the CD, there was a
README file at the top level, which mentioned that to build the software, one
needed a GNU/Linux system as well as a list of approximately 10 packages.
These sorts of plain text instructions are helpful because we know what kind
of system we are expected to use, and what commands we should run on it. Such
instructions are not strictly required, as an obviously-named shell script may
suffice, but they are helpful in clarifying any ambiguities that may arise.
% FIXME: Spend some time here (admittedly a digression: maybe refer to
% another section later?) about how it's ok to specify a specific build
% environment.
* Since the instructions didn't mention a specific distro to use, we ran the
build on an amd64 Debian 6 machine we had, after confirming the packages were
installed. In particular, we ran "make", as described in the instructions in
the README. The instructions said that "make menuconfig" could be used to
adjust the settings, but it appeared this step was optional ("Please note that
the default configuration is what was used to build the firmware image for
your router. It is advised that you use this configuration.") so we chose to
skip straight to the "make" step instead. This was done after extracting the
librecmc-v1.2.1.tar.bz2 tarball, which was not explicitly spelled out (this
should ideally be added to the README), but was implied by the
"u-boot_reflash" file (in the same directory as the README), which explicitly
used the other tarball. The build took about 40 minutes to run on our system.