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 to your harddisc or do an checkout from the T2 subversion repository to get a current T2 develpoment snapshot:

or the latest T2 stable branch:

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 in later "cross compile everything" series, as scheduled around for T2 7.0++.)

(4. Download the sources for your the selected target by typing

Keep in mind that this may consume some discspace (for example the desktop target takes about 2GB. As of T2 6.0 you can skip this step, the sources will be downloaded on-the-fly if missing.)

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 iso/ directory. Burn each one on a CD-R and boot from the CD number 1.

(Releases before T2 6.0 required the build of a second, install target for a bootable CD. Since 6.0 this is no longer necessary and nearly any system can be installable or a live-cd. This is controlled by target image option at config time.)