How to compile your own ITGate Firmware

Here you'll find first level informations that will help you to setup a Cross Development Kit (or CDK), in order to produce your own ITGate firmware...


Disclaimer

Setting up a non official firmware into your receiver may cause large damages to the device. End users are warned that, by doing this, they won't have the possibility to claim about waranty for any damage, in case of a receiver that is not used only with the official firmware.


Before you begin

Building a firmware for a device such as your ITGate is not a simple task. It involves large compilation processes and complicated building tasks. For this reason, you should not start such a process if you're not sure of what you're doing. Having a good understanding of GNU compilation process is required. You should also be easy enough in using a Linux development system, as all tasks can only be performed under such an operating system.


System pre-requisites

Here are the things you need to achieve a firmware building process :

A computer with a Linux OS + development tools (at least, compilers).
About 1 Gb of free user space on your harddisk.
A high speed (DSL) internet link, as a lot of large files will be downloaded during the process.

For development tools, here are the minimal tools and their version numver you MUST have :



Downloading primary files

Change to the directory you want the CDK to be installed in and issue the following commande sequence :






Dont miss the ending point in the cvs command.

This one will run during a while, and will download all required source files onto your system.


Downloading dependencies

When all is done, do the following :







This second sequence will make your computer downloading all the archives from different web sites, that are required to build a complete image. If you can not succeed in this step, there's no way out !


Building the image

Now that you've got all the required parts, all you have to do is to run the following command sequence :






The first make will produce all binaries. It will take several hours for any system to build complete CDK but fortunatly, you won't have to do it each time !!! Only for the first CDK setup.

The second command will build the image itself. You'll find several files...let's see them.


Output files, flash process

Change into the following directory :







You'll find here several directories names TGS100xxx, that containes files used for flashing.

TGS100ftpmc is for memory card (and ftp) flashing
TGS100srl is for serial link flashing

There's also a tftp procedure to flash the receiver, but it won't be explained here as it require direct flash operations that are dangerous and may cause bootloader to be permanently destroyed !

For this tutorial, we will simply upload the software part of the image and flash it. Go into the TGS100ftpmc directory. You'll find the following files and directories :





The first 2 are directories that contains flashing tools. The others are different parts of the image. As you may think, the _complet.img file is the 16 Mb complet image file. This file can be placed on a memory card with others required files in order to flash the whole memory, including an empty /var directory.

For test purpose, you only have to flash the software part of the image. This can be done with the _update.img file.

For this, just cd to the flashtools directory. You'll see that this img file has been copyed here, together with a bin directory that contains the flashing tool itself.

So now do the following :







Of course, replace the IP address with the one of your TGS100 ! Log onto it with required login and password, then...





All files are loaded into /tmp onto the receiver. Connect to it via a telnet command and execute the final flash process :






Into the telnet do the following to prevent problems :







Then start the flashtool :






You'll see the erase procedure then the flash procedure. After both of them, the receiver will reboot and you image will be active !

Congratulation ! You now have your own firm into the box !



Trouble shooting

Any problem when compiling the "lemm" game ?

change into its directory and clean it, then start the build process again :





many thanks to DREAMBUSTER