RPI Tool Chain

The Raspberry Pi Foundation is providing a ready-to-use toolchain on their github repository. You can use it to save yourself some time.

To do so, you need to have git installed and to clone the repository

> sudo apt-get install git-core
> git clone https://github.com/raspberrypi/tools.git --depth=1
> export PATH=$PATH:$HOME/tools/arm-bcm2708/gcc-linaro-arm-linux-gnueabihf-raspbian/bin

The “–depth=1” is here to tell git we only want the last revision, and not the whole history to be cloned.

Create a new file named test.cpp and copy/paste the following code:

#include <iostream>

int main(void)
{
    std::cout<<"Hello ARM world !\n";
    return 0;
}

Then, enter the following commands:

> arm-linux-gnueabihf-g++ test.cpp -o test
> file test
test: ELF 32-bit LSB executable, ARM, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked (uses shared libs), for GNU/Linux 2.6.26, BuildID[sha1]=0xfd72b5c6878433eb7f2296acceba9f648294a58c, not stripped

As you see, you can’t execute this program on your PC. The file command tells you that this executable is built for ARM processors.