How to build GhostBSD Release

Preparing the environment

The GhostBSD toolkit has been designed to allow building of both, i386 and amd64 architectures on amd64 architectures. However, in order to build the packages for a specific environment, the packaging process must take place on this exact environment (so amd64 packages can only be built on amd64 environment and i386 packages - on i386).

First, you need to download the newest version of FreeBSD here - at this point you will be interested in 9.0 release series. Install it on your building machine, ensuring that during the installation process, you choose the src and port packages. These are crucial for the building process. If you are planning to build packages from sources, please make sure you’ve dedicated a solid amount of disk space to swap (I suggest at least 4GB, especially on a amd64 machine).

After installing and setting up the building environment (make sure all your hardware has been more or less properly recognized - you will need quite some processing power, especially if you intend to build from ports).

First thing to do is download the newest version of the GhostBSD toolkit. The best way to do it so is via subversion (svn). It is not included by default on your new FreeBSD machine - to install it you must issue one of the following commands:

pkg install subversion

This one has to be done after fetching the ports tree, which you can do with:

portsnap fetch update

I strongly suggest downloading the toolkit itself to /src

cd /usr

and then

git clone https://github.com/GhostBSD/ghostbsd-build.git

Once svn checkout completes, you will have the whole GhostBSD development environment available on your machine locally. Time to do some preliminary configuration!

Preliminary configuration

First, you need to make some changes in fstab and rc.conf (using your favorite editor - we are going to be using ee here)

ee /etc/fstab

add the following lines to the file:

proc /proc procfs rw 0 0
linproc /compat/linux/proc linprocfs rw 0 0

Make sure to create /compat/linux/proc directory before proceeding.

mkdir -p /compat/linux/proc

Now mount linproc and proc

mount linproc
mount proc

Edit rc.conf

ee /etc/rc.conf

Add the following settings to the file:

gnome_enable="YES"
hald_enable="YES"
dbus_enable="YES"
linux_enable="YES"

Reboot your machine.

Your development environment is now ready for building the packages.

Building the packages

Change directory to the GhostBSD tools directory:

cd /usr/3.0-RC/tool

At this point, you can choose to build using packages or ports. The choice is yours to make and there are different reasons for either. Usually, you would consider the points made in the FreeBSD Handbook (http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/books/handbook/ports-overview.html) but keep in mind you are building a reusable environment, possibly for others as well, so it is very important to choose more generic options (well provided in the package distribution system of FreeBSD).

Again, you will only be able to build for amd64 on an amd64 installation of FreeBSD. If you wish to build 32 bit media, you need to use an i386 installation of the system.

To install software from ports, run:

sh ports

Note: You need portupgrade install to use ports.

For packages, run:

sh pkginstall.sh

At this point you can also add the software of your own (as the script above only handles the crucial GhostBSD parts). You can do it by installing the software either from packages or ports, like with the standard installation on a FreeBSD machine.

After the installation of all packages completes, you need to pack your software:

sh make_allpkg.sh

Now we are ready to configure and build the system.

Configuring the system

Have a look in /usr/4.0-ALPHA/conf/ghostbsd.defaults.conf - you will notice very important lines below:

NO_BUILDWORLD=YES

NO_BUILDKERNEL=YES

Comment these two lines the first time you run the building process. The next time you run it, you can uncomment them - it will then save you quite some time (you simply do not need to rebuild your kernel and world every time unless you’ve committed significant changes to them).

There are many other options available for configuration in ghostbsd.defaults.conf.

ARCH="amd64"

means that you are building the amd64 system. If you want to build for i386, change it as below:

ARCH="i386"

You can also choose, whether to build GNOME or LXDE:

PACK_PROFILE=${PACK_PROFILE:-"lxde"}
PACK_PROFILE=${PACK_PROFILE:-"gnome"}

Building the system

Now that the whole configuration is done, all you need to push the button:

cd /usr/4.0-ALPHA
make

This will build the whole system and the .iso image. To build the USB .img, you will additionally want to issue the below commands:

make img

Now all we need to do is clean up after building (remember you can only build back after issuing the below commands):

make clean
make cleandir