Downloading and Building Mika

Source code repository

You can obtain a copy of the "head" (i.e. latest developement-) version of Mika from the source repository as follows:

svn checkout svn://svn.open-mika.org/Mika/trunk

Build tools

To build Mika you will need following tools:

  • a PC running Linux (any recent distro)
  • a Java runtime on which to run ant
  • Apache ant (version 1.6.2 or higher)
  • a Java compiler such as javac or ecj (we no longer recommend jikes).
  • jam. FT Jam works fine.
  • awk (preferably GNU awk)
  • a gcc (cross-)toolchain for your target platform.

The Java compiler you want to use should be configured as the default compiler used by ant. If for some reason this is not the case then you will need to set the Java compiler on the ant command line using e.g. -Dbuild.compiler=gcj. See http://ant.apache.org/manual/Tasks/javac.html for more details.

Building Mika

After the checkout you should have a trunk directory. To build a version of Mika for PC, type

cd trunk

ant -DPLATFORM=pc

(or -DPLATFORM=pc-awt if you want to have an AWT version).

To build for another platform you should normally create your own set of Configuration files. However for arm you can try:

ant -DPLATFORM=default -DJAM.PLATFORM=arm-linux

(check in Configuration/platform for other alternatives than arm-linux). In the event of failures look in the build/platform/log directory, e.g. build/pc-awt/log or build/arm-linux/log. One commmon problem is that your cross-compiler has a different name; you can fix that in the Configuration/cpu/cpu file.

Once the build is completed, you'll find the binaries in the release/platform directory. Example:

ant -DPLATFORM=pc

would create it files in directory release/pc/, so the command to run Mika is ./release/bin/mika parameters...

(to be continued) .. .