Specifications

Appendix E

RTAI

In this appendix it is assumed you are logged in as root. You will need it at least for installing the

kernel and RTAI.

E.1 Requirements for RTAI

The required software for RTAI can either be copied from the CD or be downloaded from internet.

After copying the source-code onto the computer in any of the two ways it still needs to be unpacked.

Downloading the software from the internet The kernel source-code can also be downloaded:

http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel

For this version of RTAI use kernel 2.4.24. Go to v2.4 and download linux-2.4.24.tar.bz2 to

the directory /usr/src.

For downloading the RTAI source-code go to:

http://www.rtai.org.

Click Download RTAI and then Download Area. Now download rtai-3.0r3.tgz to the di-

rectory /usr/src.

Unpacking the software Unpack the two archives in /usr/src with:

cd /usr/src

tar --bzip2 -xvf linux-2.4.24.tar.bz2

tar -xvzf rtai-3.0r3.tgz

E.2 Compiling the kernel

To make RTAI available the kernel needs to be patched. This requires changing some parts of the

kernel source-code. Go to the directory where the Linux code has been unpacked.

cd /usr/src/linux-2.4.24

Patch the kernel using

patch -p1 < /usr/src/rtai-3.0r3/patches/patch-2.4.24-rthal5g

Next conﬁgure the kernel, it is best to use the graphical menu.

make xconfig

Now we can make use of the provided conﬁguration ﬁle (Load Configuration from File. The

location of this ﬁle is /cdrom/kernelconfig. When this conﬁguration is not used, you should pay

attention to the following:

• Loadable module support