Set Up a Development Environment

Download GingerVM

The gingervm executable is the main tool for Ginger OS. Gingervm will be used to create a new account, create virtual machine disk images, and execute many other commands.

The first step is to download and install gingervm. The latest version can be found at https://www.gingercybersecurity.com/download/. The latest.txt file contains the most recent version number, which can be helpful in scripts.

Run the code below to download the latest version. Download gingervm to a directory within $PATH, such as /usr/local/bin

gingervm_version=$(curl https://www.gingercybersecurity.com/download/latest.txt)
curl -o gingervm "https://www.gingercybersecurity.com/download/gingervm-${gingervm_version}-linux-x86_64"
chmod u+x gingervm
sudo mv gingervm /usr/local/bin

Install the Toolchain

The gingervm command line interface must have a toolchain installed to build Ginger OS systems. The toolchain includes the kernel, init process, and other resources required to build a system. The commands below only need to be run once on a new system.

gingervm toolchain install

The toolchain will be installed under ${HOME}/.ginger.

Install QEMU

QEMU will provide the virtualization functionality. The next step is to install QEMU and some helper libraries.

The QEMU installation will not be using KVM and hardware-assisted virtualization so expect the virtual machine to be a little slower than normal.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt install qemu-system-x86
# bridge-utils is installed so we can test locally
sudo apt install bridge-utils