Updates:
- 6-22-2022 – I wrote up the steps on building LWTOOLS under Windows using Cygwin. I found it very simple. But, I was not able to get Toolshed building under Cygwin.
Since I have to relearn all the steps, I thought I would post them as I go through them. The NitrOS-9 website has a tutorial on building it, but here are my steps with some specifically for Mac OS X:
- Install the Command Line Tools for Mac OS X.
We need the command line versions of the Mac OS X compiler so we can build the tools that are then used to build NitrOS-9. If you have XCODE installed, you may already have them. An easy way to do this is from a Terminal prompt:xcode-select --install
That will launch the Apple Mac App Store installer and get the tools for you. Cool.
The NitrOS-9 repository uses Mercurial as version control. You will need to download Mercurial. I had 3.2 the last time I did this, and currently it looks like 3.8 is available. There are several ways to download it using various package managers (Fink, MacPorts, etc.) but I don’t have this installed so I am just using the standalone installer:
https://www.mercurial-scm.org/wiki/Download
Depending on your Mac OS X security settings, it may complain that this is from an unknown developer and refuse to run. If you get this message, go in to your System Preferences “Security & Privacy” control panel and tell it to allow the installer to run:
(Strange. The last time I did this, “Open Anyway” would let me bypass the security settings I am using. This time, it refused, and I had to temporarily allow “Anywhere.” Not sure what’s up with that.) After the install, you will have the “hg” command available.
alsmbpro:lwtools allenh$ pwd /Users/allenh/Downloads/CoCo
From this directory, use the “hg” command to obtain and build the tools. It will build the directory you specify from the command line (“lwtools”):
hg clone http://lwtools.projects.l-w.ca/hg/ lwtools cd lwtools make sudo make install cd ..
Next we want to build Toolshed. This is a series of command-line utilities that operate on CoCo/OS-9 disk images (like those used with emulators and the CoCoSDC interface). Once again, I do these steps from my “Downloads/CoCo” directory:
hg clone http://hg.code.sf.net/p/toolshed/code toolshed cd toolshed sudo make -C build/unix install cd ..
(Note: I had to use “sudo make…” here to get it to build on my system.) The different build/make process shows the different styles of the various developers that made these tools. (Note: Mine seems to fail looking for a command “markdown” at the very end. Not sure what this is, but it seems to be building HTML documentation or something.)
Now we are ready to download and build NitrOS-9. Once again, I start in my “Downloads/CoCo” directory, and issue the following hg commands to download all the NitrOS-9 stuff:
hg clone http://hg.code.sf.net/p/nitros9/code nitros9 cd nitros9 make dsk
make dsk PORTS=coco3_6309
After this, you will have all the sources, and have built all (or some) of the sample disk images for various types of hardware (CoCo 1/2, CoCo 3, 6809 or 6309, CoCoSDC controller versus floppy or IDE hard drive, etc.).
Later, if you want to update your sources, you can use this comment from the “nitros9” directory:
hg pull hg update make dsk
I do this occasionally to get the “latest and greatest.” You can do this for the other tools, too, by changing in to their directory then issuing the “pull” and “update”, then the appropriate make command.
If you get a merge conflict because you changed something locally, you might see this:
alsmbpro:nitros9 allenh$ hg update abort: outstanding merge conflicts
You can use this command to see what files have been changed on your local repository that conflict with the master files. This happens if, for instance, you tweak a makefile or build list or source code:
alsmbpro:nitros9 allenh$ hg resolve -l U 3rdparty/utils/tlindner/sdir.asm
This reminded me that I already Tim’s “sdir” source code (for CoCoSDC) so enable built in help and such. I have to revert those changes if I want to update, or learn how to use the merge too… I forgot!
These steps should get you everything you need to begin playing with NitrOS-9 on a real CoCo with the CoCoSDC interface, or an emulator. If you plan to use real floppies, you can use toolshed utilities to format and then copy disk image .DSK files over to the physical floppy, but I don’t have any way to hook a 360K Floppy drive to my Mac so I have never done this. CoCoSDC is the way to go there ($40!).
More to come…
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