Getting and Building the Haiku Source Code

Please note this document mainly pertains to building Haiku under BeOS R5 and later.

Getting the source

All commands must be executed in the Terminal.

Go to the parent directory for Haiku's repository and enter:

svn checkout svn://svn.berlios.de/haiku/haiku/trunk haiku

This will checkout the source into a new subdirectory called "haiku". Members of Haiku should login with their BerliOS account to get commit access:

svn checkout svn+ssh://developername@svn.berlios.de/svnroot/repos/haiku/haiku/trunk haiku

After the initial checkout (also in case not the entire tree was checked out successfully) you can fetch source code updates with the following command in your repository's root folder:

svn update

Installing the cross-compiler

Download the Haiku cross-compiler [1] and extract it to "/boot" (for example by setting the "Destination" in Expander to just "/boot"). Then you need to configure your tree to use this cross compiler. Go to the root folder of your checked out Haiku repository and invoke the configure script with the "cross-tools-prefix" option like this:

configure --cross-tools-prefix /boot/apps/haiku/cross-tools/bin/i586-pc-haiku-

Be careful to include all of the string up to and including the last dash, as all the cross compiler tools have this prefix (they are for example called "i586-pc-haiku-ar"). You need to specify this prefix everytime you run configure.

Building the source

You can now start the build process with:

jam

Note that this will just build any target that is found in the tree. This is usually not that useful, as many parts might not build and are not required. So optionally, a target can be specified by adding a target name. For example, "jam app_server" will only build the app_server target. Normally though you will want to build an image or installation using the commands below. Add the "-a" option to rebuild the whole source or only the specified target in case Jam didn't notice source changes.

Building an image

You can build a Haiku image with:

jam haiku-image

This will place a file named "haiku.image" into the "generated" folder.

To build an image for testing in VMWare:

jam haiku-vmware-image

This will place a file named "haiku.vmdk" into the "generated" folder.

Instead of building an image, you may install Haiku on a mounted partition using:

HAIKU_INSTALL_DIR=/target_folder jam install-haiku