Next Steps

Congratulations on your newly-minted Shedbuilt setup! Right away you have access to a trove of powerful, command-line utilities that would be the envy of any mid-1990s Linux user. That said, I expect that you have much more in mind for your little ARM SBC so here are some tips to get your project off on the right foot.

Installing Software

You can build and install software packaged by the community using the included shedmake utility. The quickest route to obtaining pre-packaged software is to:

  1. Browse the pre-installed package repositories (utils, games, etc.) in /var/shedmake/repos/remote and select an interesting package.
  2. Ensure your device is connected to the Internet to download needed source and/or binary files.
  3. Instruct shedmake to install the package.

For example, let's say you'd like to install the Zork interpreter frotz which is available in the Shedbuilt Games repository installed to /var/shedmake/repos/remote/games. Simply pass the name of the package to the install action and shedmake will handle the rest:

sudo shedmake install frotz

When shedmake is instructed to install a package that has not yet been compiled, it will attempt to fetch a compatible binary. If none is advertised, it will instead fetch and build the source. Some packages have 'dependencies' for compilation and/or installation, requiring you to install other packages first. If required package have not been installed, shedmake will alert you and the install will fail. To have shedmake install dependencies automatically, supply the option --install-dependencies (or -i) to the install action.

Check out the Shedmake Reference for more details concerning its capabilities and usage or peruse our Fun and Games section for more suggested packages.

Learn How to Package New Software

Shedbuilt GNU/Linux is designed to facilitate the creation of new software packages. Check out our Packaging documentation to learn how to use shedmake to build software and distribute it to others in the Shedbuilt community!

Make your own Shedbuilt From Scratch

Each Shedbuilt system image includes the all tools you need to compile a complete GNU/Linux system from scratch on your device. If you're interested in how operating systems are put together, or want to experiment with creating your own remix system images, we encourage you to explore our extensive Bootstrapping docs.