Installing prc-tools on an RPM-based system

At present, prebuilt prc-tools RPMs are available for x86 Linux only. We build binary RPMs on architectures to which we have access. If you would like to contribute a build on another architecture, please contact us.

To install a prc-tools RPM, download the appropriate version and architecture from the downloads page and install it using your favourite package management tool, or by logging on as root and typing

# rpm -Uvh prc-tools-version.arch.rpm

Most of the other components used in conjunction with prc-tools are also available as RPMs:

The prc-tools documentation is supplied in info format by the prc-tools, GCC, etc, packages, and is also available as HTML in the prc-tools-htmldocs package, which you can download from the same places as the main prc-tools package. By default, the documentation is made available at /opt/palmdev/doc/index.html
The prc-tools-arm package, which requires the main prc-tools package to also be installed, contains the additional tools necessary for building ARM programs.
The 4.0 Palm OS SDK's Unix installer (listed first on the page, as Palm OS SDK 4.0 for CodeWarrior and/or PRC-Tools) is a tarball containing an RPM and its license.
Earlier versions of the SDK and other Palm OS-related SDKs are not available as RPMs; you'll have to install them in /opt/palmdev/sdk-n manually.
PilRC (and PilRCUI) RPMs are available from http://sourceforge.net/projects/pilrc/
RPMs for the Palm OS Emulator and most of the usual Skins used with it are available from http://sourceforge.net/projects/pose/. There is also a separate RPM containing the Perl scripts that come with the Emulator, which are in fact capable of communicating with any Palm OS device.
You'll need to download ROMs from the usual places separately and install them manually: they are generally not redistributable, so only PalmSource itself (or, generally, the copyright holder for a particular ROM) could distribute them packaged as RPMs.

These other RPMs are, of course, installed similarly via a package management tool, such as the rpm command.

The tools RPMs (but not the SDK ones) are listed in the Development/Palm OS group at rpmfind (but not at all mirrors).

Post-installation setup

Neither prc-tools nor GCC has any built-in knowledge of what Palm OS SDKs and other header files and libraries (collectively, development material) you happen to have installed. You can use palmdev-prep to provide such knowledge: after running it, m68k-palmos-gcc will be able to find Palm OS-related headers and libraries automatically, i.e., without needing any extra -I and -L options, and will have a new -palmosN option for selecting which SDK to use.

You should rerun palmdev-prep whenever you upgrade prc-tools or install or remove a Palm OS SDK or other development material. You should also rerun it using its -d SDK option when you want to change which SDK is to be used by default, i.e., in the absence of any -palmosN options.

Because it creates configuration files in system directories, this too needs to be done while you are logged on as root:

# palmdev-prep

Palmdev-prep will search /opt/palmdev for SDKs and other development material and report on what it finds. This report reflects the SDKs that will be accessible via a -palmosN option to GCC, so if it fails to list some SDK that you think you have installed, you'll have to figure out why prc-tools has not been able to detect it. In general, prc-tools prefers and expects the directory structure of a Palm OS SDK to look like

/opt/palmdev/sdk-N/include
Header files, arranged in arbitrary directories under include
/opt/palmdev/sdk-N/lib/m68k-palmos-coff
Static (link-time) libraries for m68k-palmos

For compatibility with some of the ways in which SDKs have been packaged, palmdev-prep will also correctly detect an SDK when header files are under Incs instead of include and/or libraries are under GCC Libraries instead of lib.

In the past, /usr/local/palmdev was the canonical place to put SDKs. If you still have SDKs installed there, you can either move them or tell palmdev-prep to look there as well each time you run it:

# palmdev-prep /usr/local/palmdev

Part of the installation guide of the prc-tools web pages