Running BrickOS/LegOS at Home

BrickOS on Windows

When running BrickOS/LegOS at home in your Microsoft Windows 95/98/NT/2K/Something environment you need to install a cygwin shell and a Hitachi-H8 cross compiler(ie a compiler that can generate code for another processor).

You can use the same pre-packaged cygwin-legos.zip used in the lab-computers. Then you need to:

1. Download the cygwin-legos.zip package (56 MB). Unpack it into the root of C:. This will unpack a cygwin installation into the directory C:\cygwin-legos. It is important to unpack exactly to this place, otherwise the paths will not work.
2. Download the registry patch cygwin.reg. This file contains data that cygwin needs to find its paths. Either run it directly when it is fetched or double-click on it afterwards, this will add the needed keys to the registry.

Now choose if you would like to install the newest brickOS version or the older (and more stable) legOS version. If you choose brickOS continue with steps 3 and 4 in the instructions above. If you choose legOS continue by following the instructions here.

1. Download LegOS from the assignment page legOS.zip. It is preferable to use the legOS.zip package from the lab assignment since we needed to modify the package somewhat to get everything to work (ie. you don't need to do the modifications yourself). If you are using the legOS.zip package on the lab page you can use WinZip or some similar program. If you choose to download the original LegOS-0.2.4 or LegOS-0.2.5 packages you need to use the tar xvfz command in your Cygwin shell.
2. If you installed the cygwin program somewhere else than directly under C: you need to open Makefile.common in your LegOS directory and set the line containing TOOLPREFIX= (the one under #NT row) to TOOLPREFIX=PATH_TO_CYGWIN/usr/local/bin/h8300-hitachi-hms- where PATH_TO_CYGWIN is where you installed the cygwin package.
3. Go to the LegOS directory and type:

      make realclean
      make depend
      make
      cd util
      make strip

Hopefully everything should be compiled without any problems.

1. Follow the rest of the instructions in the Programming Lego Mindstorms using LegOS assignment on how to compile and download the kernel and your written programs.

BrickOS on Linux

To run BrickOS/LegOS at home on a Linux environment see the LegOS on Linux installing instructions page. The instructions should work, but the tools mentioned are a bit old.
If you run Debian more recent instructions are available in http://brickos.sourceforge.net/docs/install-Debian.html
More updated and detailed information on how to install and run brickOS/legOS under Linux will be added when available.