Altair 8800 Programming on Raspberry Pi OS
Jan. 6, 2021
Altair 8800 Programming on Raspberry Pi OS
Jan. 6, 2021

The Raspberry Pi project has transformed educational computing every since the release of the first Model B back in 2012.
I am using Kevin Cole's APPENDIX B: SETTING UP LINUX FOR ALTAIR
8800 as a
guide, and given that some of my students will need to compile C source
on their school issued MacBooks without admin rights, I wanted to see if
I could deploy it into $HOME/.local. I found what looks to be an
excellent guide in Building and Installing Software in
\$HOME.
With those two resources and an email from Kevin instructing me how to modify the Makefile as guides, I did the following:
-
Installed the required debian pages with:
$ sudo apt install texlive minicom gkermit simh most -
Downloaded asl-current.tar.gz and moved it to a
Resourcesdirectory with:$ mv ~/Downloads/asl-current.tar.gz ~/Resourses/ -
Extracted the archive:
$ tar xzvf asl-current.tar.gz $ cd asl-current $ cp -v Makefile.def-samples/Makefile.def-x86_64-unknown-linux Makefile.def -
Edited the
Makefile.deffile, commenting out the following lines:## BINDIR = /usr/local/bin ## INCDIR = /usr/local/include/asl ## MANDIR = /usr/local/man ## LIBDIR = /usr/local/lib/asl ## DOCDIR = /usr/local/doc/asland replacing them with:
BINDIR = $(HOME)/.local/bin LIBDIR = $(HOME)/.local/lib/asl MANDIR = $(HOME)/.local/share/man INCDIR = $(HOME)/.local/include/asl DOCDIR = $(HOME)/Documents/asl -
Compiled and locally installed the code:
$ make $ make test $ make docs $ make install -
Removed the broken German documentation:
$ rm ~/Documents/asl/as_DE.*