Before installing crosstool-NG, you may need to install additional packages on the host OS. Specific instructions for several supported operating systems and distributions are provided here. Note that not all the dependencies are currently detected by the configure script; missing some of them may later result in failing ct-ng build.

There two ways how you can obtain the crosstool-NG sources:

There also are two ways you can use crosstool-NG:

The typical workflow assumes using a released tarball and installing crosstool-NG. If you intend to do some development on crosstool-NG and/or submit patches, you’d likely want a clone of the repository and running from the source directory.

Downloading a released tarball

First, download the tarball:

wget http://crosstool-ng.org/download/crosstool-ng/crosstool-ng-VERSION.tar.bz2

or

wget http://crosstool-ng.org/download/crosstool-ng/crosstool-ng-VERSION.tar.xz

Starting with 1.21.0, releases are signed with Bryan Hundven’s PGP key. The fingerprint is:

561E D9B6 2095 88ED 23C6 8329 CAD7 C8FC 35B8 71D1

Starting with 1.23.0, releases are signed with Alexey Neyman’s PGP key. The fingerprint is:

64AA FBF2 1475 8C63 4093 45F9 7848 649B 11D6 18A4

Starting with 1.25.0, releases are signature with Chris Packham’s PGP key. The fingerprint is:

721B 0FB1 CDC8 318A EBB8  88B8 09F6 DD5F 1F30 EF2E

The public keys are found on http://pgp.surfnet.nl/. To validate the release tarball run you need to import the keys from the keyserver and download the signature of the tarball, then verify the tarball with both the tarball and the signature in the same directory:

gpg --keyserver pgp.surfnet.nl --recv-keys 35B871D1 11D618A4
wget http://crosstool-ng.org/download/crosstool-ng/crosstool-ng-VERSION.tar.bz2.sig
gpg --verify crosstool-ng-VERSION.tar.bz2.sig

Crosstool-NG releases 1.19.0 and earlier provide MD5/SHA1/SHA512 digests for the tarballs. Use md5sum/sha1sum/sha512sum commands to verify the tarballs:

md5sum -c crosstool-ng-VERSION.tar.bz2.md5
sha1sum -c crosstool-ng-VERSION.tar.bz2.sha1
sha512sum -c crosstool-ng-VERSION.tar.bz2.sha512

Cloning a repository

If the released version is not recent enough for your purposes, you can try to build using the currently developed version. To do that, clone the Git repository:

git clone https://github.com/crosstool-ng/crosstool-ng

You’ll need to run the bootstrap script before running configure:

./bootstrap

Install method

First unpack the tarball and cd into the crosstool-ng-VERSION directory.

Note

Due to a bug in release scripts, version 1.22.0 of the crosstool-ng was packaged without the VERSION suffix.

Then follow the classical configure recipe: ./configure way:

./configure --prefix=/some/place
make
make install
export PATH="${PATH}:/some/place/bin"

You can then get rid of crosstool-NG source. Next create a directory to serve as a working place, cd in there and run:

mkdir work-dir
cd work-dir
ct-ng help

Note

If you call ct-ng --help you will get help for make(1). This is because ct-ng is in fact a make(1) script. There is no clean workaround for this.

A man page for the ct-ng utility is also installed. You can get some brief help by typing man ct-ng.

The Hacker’s way

Then, you run ./configure for local execution of crosstool-NG:

./configure --enable-local
make

Now, do not remove crosstool-NG sources. They are needed to run crosstool-NG! Stay in the directory holding the sources, and run:

./ct-ng help

Preparing for packaging

If you plan on packaging crosstool-NG, you surely don’t want to install it in your root file system. The install procedure of crosstool-NG honors the DESTDIR variable:

./configure --prefix=/usr
make
make DESTDIR=/packaging/place install

Shell completion

crosstool-NG comes with a shell script fragment that defines bash-compatible completion. That shell fragment is currently not installed automatically.

To install the shell script fragment, you have two options:

  • install system-wide, most probably by copying ./bash-completion/ct-ng into /etc/bash_completion.d/, or

  • install for a single user, by copying ./bash-completion/ct-ng into ${HOME}/ and sourcing this file from your ${HOME}/.bashrc.

Contributed code

Some people contributed code that couldn’t get merged for various reasons. This code is available as lzma-compressed patches, in the contrib/ sub-directory. These patches are to be applied to the source of crosstool-NG, prior to installing, using something like the following:

lzcat contrib/foobar.patch.lzma | patch -p1

There is no guarantee that a particular contribution applies to the current version of crosstool-ng, or that it will work at all. Use contributions at your own risk.