Howto build lastest pfsense via CVS?

unforeseen · Oct 24, 2006, 12:57 PM

Hey all,

I was just looking through a few different places and wasn't sure about how to build pf from the CVS files listed on the front page. I went to the wiki but thought that the documentation there (http://wiki.pfsense.com/wikka.php?wakka=BuildingpFSense) was for something a little different. Are there some general steps to follow on all unix flavors to build the iso? Basically I downloaded the tarball, uncompressed it and looked throught it but not sure what needs to be run next to get it made.

Any help/links would be appreciated, as I have done some looking but came up empty handed.

thanks

DanielSHaischt · Oct 24, 2006, 2:41 PM

Hi,

what do you mean with on all unix flavors? You will need a FreeBSD 6.1 or 7 system to be able to build an embedded and/or ISO image.

The build system isn't designed to work on say Linux for example!

Regards
Daniel S. Haischt

unforeseen · Oct 24, 2006, 3:08 PM

hmm.. Ok.. For some reason I was under the impression on say Debian, I would be able to build the pfsense iso. So I see that is not the case. Would I have to follow the wiki to build the iso step by step? Again, I assumed on the host OS, to build the iso, it would be something like get the tarball, uncompress and run a command like ./build_iso.sh Am I incorrect?

DanielSHaischt · Oct 24, 2006, 3:24 PM

@unforeseen:

hmm.. Ok.. For some reason I was under the impression on say Debian, I would be able to build the pfsense iso. So I see that is not the case. Would I have to follow the wiki to build the iso step by step? Again, I assumed on the host OS, to build the iso, it would be something like get the tarball, uncompress and run a command like ./build_iso.sh Am I incorrect?

I am sorry to say that, but yea you are incorrect. The pfSense CVS repo and the tarball which you are refering to, do not contain system binaries such as ls, top or for example tar. Those binaries are copied from the host system that is beeing used to assemble a pfSense image/ISO. Additionally the pfSense kernel will be build using the build scripts that are discribed in the Wiki topic to which you were refering to. That would at least mean, that on Debian for example you would be required to setup a cross-compilation environment to be able to build a FreeBSD kernel.

So to make this long story short, at least IMHO it realy makes sense to assemble the pfSense image/ISO on a FreeBSD system because pfSense on its own is based on FreeBSD.

Regards
Daniel S. Haischt

unforeseen · Oct 24, 2006, 3:40 PM

Thanks for the clarification. I figured ALL the files/binaries were self contained within the tarball but your explanation makes sense (and I can see why that would not be the case) :)