Quick Build in seven-1 easy steps

1. Make sure you have got a system with a running compiler as well as functional GNU tools. T2 can be compiled on almost all newer Linux installations, if you have installed the correct packages. You can also download and install a precompiled T2 iso image to bootstrap the build.

2. Get the latest tarball of the T2 sources and extract it, or do an checkout from the T2 subversion repository to get the latest T2 develpoment snapshot:

T2 has quite minimal build requirements, along the usual Unix tools such as a shell, sed and awk only a working (ANSI) C compiler and the ncurses library and it's development headers (ncurses-devel) are required.

3. Become root, change into the T2 directory and type

to get into a text based configuration menu.
(Currently building as root is a script requirement for the permissions (yes, we know about fakeroot) but more due to the chroot sandbox build. We have plans to get rid of this limitation.)

(4. The sources for your the selected target will be downloaded on-the-fly. Although you could download them manually using

if you prefer to do so. Remember that it consumes space. For example, the complete source for a non-GUI minimal system weight 640 MB, while a minimal desktop system with a web brower easily would easily lean towards 4 GB.)

5. Start the build.

A full build of the desktop target takes about a day on a 3 Ghz Athlon or 2GHz PowerPC G5 - a build of all packages included T2 likely takes 3 days or more.

6. Create the iso images with

and look for files named my-own-t2_cd*.iso in the current directory. Write each to an USB drive, or an optical disc and boot from the first.