Ensure your CMake version is >= 3.16 with `cmake --version`. If your system doesn't provide a suitable version of CMake, you can download a binary release from the [CMake website](https://cmake.org/download).
- fuse-ext2 is not available as brew formula so it must be installed using `BuildFuseExt2.sh`
- Xcode and `xcode-tools` must be installed (`git` is required by some scripts)
- coreutils is needed to build gcc cross compiler
- qemu is needed to run the compiled OS image. You can also build it using the `BuildQemu.sh` script
- osxfuse, e2fsprogs, m4, autoconf, automake, libtool and `BuildFuseExt2.sh` are needed if you want to build the root filesystem disk image natively on macOS. This allows mounting an EXT2 fs and also installs commands like `mke2fs` that are not available on stock macOS.
- If you install some commercial EXT2 macOS fs handler instead of osxfuse and fuse-ext2, you will need to `brew install e2fsprogs` to obtain `mke2fs` anyway.
- As of 2020-08-06, you might need to tell the build system about your newer host compiler. Once you've built the toolchain, navigate to `Build/`, `rm -rf *`, then run `cmake .. -DCMAKE_C_COMPILER=gcc-10 -DCMAKE_CXX_COMPILER=g++-10`, then continue with `make install` as usual.
For Windows, you will require Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 (WSL2). [Follow the WSL2 instructions here.](https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/blob/master/Documentation/NotesOnWSL.md)
Do note the ```Hardware acceleration``` and ```Note on filesystems``` sections, otherwise performance will be terrible.
Once you have installed a distro for WSL2, follow the Linux prerequisites above for the distro you installed, then continue as normal.
Once the toolchain has been built, go into the `Build/` directory and run the commands. Note that while `ninja` seems to be faster, you can also just use GNU make, by omitting `-G Ninja` and calling `make` instead of `ninja`:
This will compile all of SerenityOS and install the built files into `Root/` inside the build tree. `ninja install` actually pulls in the regular `ninja` (`ninja all`) automatically, so there isn't really a need to run it explicitly. `ninja` will automatically build as many jobs in parallel as it detects processors; `make` builds only one job in parallel. (Use the `-j` option with an argument if you want to change this.)
On Linux, QEMU is significantly faster if it's able to use KVM. The run script will automatically enable KVM if `/dev/kvm` exists and is readable+writable by the current user.
Bare curious users may even consider sourcing suitable hardware to [install Serenity on a physical PC.](https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/blob/master/Documentation/INSTALL.md)
Outside of QEMU, Serenity will run on VirtualBox. If you're curious, see how to [install Serenity on VirtualBox.](https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/blob/master/Documentation/VirtualBox.md)
Later on, when you `git pull` to get the latest changes, there's (usually) no need to rebuild the toolchain. You can simply run `ninja install`, `ninja image`, and `ninja run` again. CMake will only rebuild those parts that have been updated.
To add a package from the ports collection to Serenity, for example curl, go into `Ports/curl/` and run **./package.sh**. The sourcecode for the package will be downloaded and the package will be built. After that, run **make image** from the `Build/` directory to update the disk image. The next time you start Serenity with **make run**, `curl` will be available.