Installing from SCM

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Revision as of 04:12, 7 May 2011 by RazvanM (talk | contribs) (Step 5: Set the environment variables)
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NOTE: It is highly recommended to remove the system-wide tinyos-tools package when using the TinyOS from CVS/SVN/GIT. Git repositories mirroring the TinyOS CVS repository can be found at:


Step 0: Enable the John Hopkins (HINRG) tinyos repository

The TinyOS Ubuntu pool is the same across all current distributions. So specifing karmic as the distribution specifier.


sudo echo "deb http://hinrg.cs.jhu.edu/tinyos karmic main" >> /etc/apt/sources.list
# or sudo apt-add-repository "deb http://hinrg.cs.jhu.edu/tinyos karmic main"
sudo apt-get update


Step 1: Install the nesc compiler

sudo apt-get install nesc


Possible contingency

there may be a contigency between the repo, ubuntu version, nesc, and java. If so read on. If everything works then jump to step 2.

The John Hopkins repository contains the 1.3.0 which has a required dependency on sun-java5-jdk/sun-java6-jdk. If you are using a newer version of Ubuntu or Debian that doesn't provide this, you can install the nesc 1.3.1:


Step 2: Install the crosstools

Debian MSP430:

sudo apt-get install msp430-binutils-tinyos msp430-gcc-tinyos msp430-libc-tinyos

Debian AVR:

sudo apt-get install avr-binutils-tinyos msp430-gcc-tinyos msp430-libc-tinyos

Step 3: Checkout the TinyOS 2.x source tree

Checkouts from TinyOS SVN repository are read-only.

cd ~
mkdir -p local/src
cd local/src
svn checkout http://tinyos-main.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ tinyos-2.x

If you want to use git then instead of the last command you can do:

git clone git://hinrg.cs.jhu.edu/git/tinyos-2.x.svn   tinyos-2.x

Step 4: Compile the TinyOS tools

 sudo apt-get install automake
 cd tinyos-2.x/tools
 ./Bootstrap
 ./configure --prefix=$HOME/local
 make all
 make install

A few ENTERs will be required by the last two commands.

Step 5: Set the environment variables

Add the following to .profile (or .bash_profile or .bashrc depending on your system):

export PATH=$HOME/local/bin:$PATH
export TOSROOT=$HOME/local/src/tinyos-2.x
export TOSDIR=$TOSROOT/tos
export MAKERULES=$TOSROOT/support/make/Makerules
export CLASSPATH=$TOSROOT/support/sdk/java/tinyos.jar:.
export PYTHONPATH=.:$TOSROOT/support/sdk/python:$PYTHONPATH
export PATH=$TOSROOT/support/sdk/c:$PATH