frc-gcc-vm

This is a vagrant-based VM that allows you to install the FRC GCC 4.8 build packages so you can build executables for the FRC cRIO platform.

This has been tested on OSX, but it should run equally well on Linux and on Windows platforms. File a bug report if you find this to not be the case.

Pre-deploy setup steps

Host software requirements

The VM guest is a 64-bit host, as the GCC deb files only are 64-bit builds. You may be able to run 64-bit guests on a 32-bit host, but there are specific requirements that virtualbox has, and some problems have been reported in that configuration. Search the internet for more details.

1. Install Virtualbox 4.2.16 or greater
   • Any newish version will work, but there are vagrant incompatibility issues with older versions of virtualbox, so stay newer
2. Install Vagrant [http://www.vagrantup.com]
   • Version 1.2 or greater should work, but definitely get at least 1.3.5

Setting up a global shared folder (optional, but recommended)

To access your development files from the Vagrant VM, you need to setup a shared folder that allows the Vagrant VM to access the files from inside the VM.

What you can do is setup a global Vagrantfile, and all of the VMs that are stood up by your username will get the settings inside that VM. Just create a file ~/.vagrant.d/Vagrantfile so it looks like the following. This will map some local folder to /src on the vagrant VM Ñ but of course, you should set the paths to values that make sense for you.

Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
    
    config.vm.provider :virtualbox do |vbox, override|

        # path on your local machine
        host_folder_name = "~/local/path/to/somewhere"

        # path where the local folder is mapped to inside the VM
        vm_folder_name = "/src"

        override.vm.synced_folder File.expand_path(host_folder_name), vm_folder_name
    end

end

Start the VM

Open up a command prompt/terminal and run the following commands.

$ cd <this directory>
$ vagrant up

If all is well, a bunch of stuff will happen and you'll have a VM that will have the necessary tools to build C++ projects for WPILib on the cRio. You can access the VM by doing:

$ vagrant ssh

Keep in mind that starting the VM the first time may take a long time, particularly because installing the base VM involves downloading hundreds of megabytes.

After the VM is brought up the first time, subsequent invocations of the 'up' command should be significantly faster, since everything is already set up for you.

To shutdown the vm, you can do:

$ vagrant halt

Building things with this VM

SSH into the VM, and run the FRCMake commands as documented on its wiki.

TODO

Contributing

If you find bugs, file an issue on the bug tracker, or fork this repository and submit a pull request with your fix in it.

Authors

Author:: Dustin Spicuzza (dustin@virtualroadside.com)