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Chapter 3 Getting RTAI
Illustration 2: The browsable CVS repository
Further information on how to access the CVS can be obtained at the following address
https://gna.org/cvs/?group=rtai
3.1 The showroom repository
As mentioned before one module is named showroom and it contains a lot of source code
examples covering almost all the features available in RTAI. It's important to take into account
that inside the main RTAI source tarball there are just a few basic examples, in the testsuite
directory, to allow checking that the installation went well. That is done mainly to keep it small
and to allow experienced RTAI user to avoid downloading it over and over. For such a reason if
you are approaching RTAI for the very first time, downloading the showroom is a
necessary/mandatory step. The showroom is also very important for knowing about newly
developed features which maybe present in the latest release and that are always explained by
a brand new example(s).
In order to compile the examples from the showroom, you have to make sure that $prefix/bin
is in your PATH variable, where $prefix represents the RTAI's installation root (as you will see in
the next chapter, by default prefix is set to /usr/realtime). This is important to let the Makefiles
and the runfiles of each single example access the rtai-config utility. To compile and execute
the examples just run the make and the ./run script located in its directory. The showroom
examples directory scheme and names are also very clear to help you understand immediately
the purpose of a specific example. All the examples are divided into two main branches that are
“kern”, which contains the examples related mainly to RTAI kernel mode development and
“user”, for user space. Naturally since RTAI schedulers allow full kernel/user space
inter/intraoperability you will find also mixed applications in both branches. Last but not least
all the examples have a README file that explains better its behavior and its design.
RTAI User Manual 3.4 – October 2006 – rev 0.3 - pag 4