For Debian/Ubuntu, most tools are available from the system package manager apt-get.

CMake

Important: For Ubuntu versions older than zesty, a manual installation of CMake is required as the version available in the package manager is older than 3.6. Visit CMake to download the latest release and follow the installation instructions.

To install CMake, simply call:

$ sudo apt-get install cmake cmake-curses-gui

Ensure that your CMake version is at least 3.6:

$ cmake --version
cmake version 3.9.2

CMake suite maintained and supported by Kitware (kitware.com/cmake).

Toolchain

For Debian/Ubuntu, the GNU ARM Embedded toolchain is supported. The version usually found in the Debian package manager is quite old (4.9.3). Therefore, install the toolchain in the following way:

$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:team-gcc-arm-embedded/ppa
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install gcc-arm-embedded

This will also install GDB (the GNU Debugger) for ARM.

Python

The default Python version that comes with most Linux distributions is Python 2.7, but the nRF5 SDK for Mesh requires Python 3.5. We highly recommend using virtualenv to manage Python versions. It makes managing Python settings across different projects easy. Install it with:

$ sudo apt-get install virtualenv

Next, make a directory to keep your virtual environments in and create a new environment for mesh development:

$ mkdir virtualenvs
$ virtualenv -p python3 virtualenvs/mesh

The environment must be activated. This will set the python and pip commands to point to the version within the given environment. All packages installed through pip will be local to the active environment. This is how the environment is activated:

$ source virtualenvs/mesh/bin/activate
...
$ which python
/home/<user-name>/virtualenvs/mesh/bin/python
$ which pip
/home/<user-name>/virtualenvs/mesh/bin/pip

Deactivate the environment with:

$ deactivate

The environment will only be set for the active shell session. To make this virtual environment the default when starting a new shell, add the following to your ~/.bashrc file:

source virtualenvs/mesh/bin/activate

Build system

make is the default build system on Debian/Ubuntu and usually comes with the distribution. However, if Ninja is preferred, it can be installed with:

$ sudo apt-get install ninja-build

Additional tools for building unit tests (host) [Optional]

The unit test (host) build uses the standard GCC compiler, which should be available in the Debian/Ubuntu distribution by default. To enable compilation for a 32-bit architecture on a 64-bit system (-m32), multilib is required. Install it with:

$ sudo apt-get install gcc-multilib

Ruby is used by the mocking framework CMock. Install it with:

$ sudo apt-get install ruby