inav/docs/development/Building in Windows 10 or 11 with Linux Subsystem.md

Building in Windows 10 with Linux subsystem [Recommended]

Linux subsystem for Windows 10 is probably the simplest way of building INAV under Windows 10.

Setting up the environment

Enable WSL: run windows features enable windows subsytem for linux reboot

Install Ubuntu:

1. Go to Microsoft store https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/store/b/home
2. Search and install most recent Ubuntu LTS version
3. When download completed, select Launch Ubuntu
4. When prompted enter a user name and password which you will need to remember
5. When complete, the linux command prompt will be displayed

NOTE: from this point all commands are entered into the Ubunto shell command window

Update the repo packages:

• sudo apt update

Install Git, Make, gcc and Ruby

• sudo apt-get install git make cmake ruby

Install python and python-yaml to allow updates to settings.md

• sudo apt-get install python3

CMAKE and Ubuntu 18_04

To run cmake in the latest version you will need to update from Ubuntu 18_04 to 20_04. The fastest way to do it is to uninstall current version and install 20_04 for Microsoft Store https://www.microsoft.com/store/productId/9N6SVWS3RX71

Downloading the INAV repository (example):

Mount MS windows C drive and clone INAV

1. cd /mnt/c
2. git clone https://github.com/iNavFlight/inav.git
3. git checkout 6.1.1 (to switch to a specific release tag, for this example INAV version 6.1.1)
4. git checkout -b my-branch (to create own branch)

You are ready! You now have a folder called inav in the root of C drive that you can edit in windows

If you get a cloning error

On some installations, you may see the following error:

Cloning into 'inav'...
error: chmod on /mnt/c/inav/.git/config.lock failed: Operation not permitted
fatal: could not set 'core.filemode' to 'false'

You can fix this with by remounting the drive using the following commands

1. sudo umount /mnt/c
2. sudo mount -t drvfs C: /mnt/c -o metadata

Building (example):

For detailed build instrusctions see Building in Linux

Launch Ubuntu: Click Windows Start button then scroll and lauch "Ubuntu"

Building from Ubuntu command line

cd /mnt/c/inav

Do it onece to prepare build environment

mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..

Then to build

cd build
make MATEKF722

Updating the documents

cd /mnt/c/inav
python3 src/utils/update_cli_docs.py

Flashing:

Launch windows configurator GUI and from within the firmware flasher select Load firmware[Local] Hex files can be found in the folder c:\inav\build

Troubleshooting

Syntax error: "(" unexpected

dzikuvx@BerlinAtHome:/mnt/c/Users/pspyc/Documents/Projects/inav/build$ make MATEKF722SE
Generating MATEKF722SE/settings_generated.h, MATEKF722SE/settings_generated.c
/bin/sh: 1: Syntax error: "(" unexpected
make[3]: *** [src/main/target/MATEKF722SE/CMakeFiles/MATEKF722SE.elf.dir/build.make:63: src/main/target/MATEKF722SE/MATEKF722SE/settings_generated.h] Error 2
make[2]: *** [CMakeFiles/Makefile2:33607: src/main/target/MATEKF722SE/CMakeFiles/MATEKF722SE.elf.dir/all] Error 2
make[1]: *** [CMakeFiles/Makefile2:33290: src/main/target/MATEKF722SE/CMakeFiles/MATEKF722SE.dir/rule] Error 2
make: *** [Makefile:13703: MATEKF722SE] Error 2

This error can be triggered by a Windows PATHs included in the Linux Subsystem. The solution is:

For WSL V1 - Flags set as 7 by default

1. Open Windows RegEdit tool
2. Find HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Lxss\{GUID}\Flags
3. Change Flags from 7 to 5
4. Restart WSL and Windows preferably
5. cd build
6. cmake ..
7. make {TARGET} should be working again

For WSL V2 - Flags set as 0x0000000f (15) by default

1. Open Windows RegEdit tool
2. Find HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Lxss\{GUID}\Flags
3. Change Flags from f to d, it is stored as Base Hexadecimal
4. Restart WSL and Windows preferably
5. cd build
6. cmake ..
7. make {TARGET} should be working again

Or, for either version

1. In the Linux Subsystem, cd /etc/
2. Create a new file with sudo nano wsl.conf
3. Enter the following in to the new file:

[Interop]
appendWindowsPath=false

4. Save the file by holding Ctrl and pressing o
5. Press Enter to confirm the wsl.conf filename.
6. Hit Ctrl+x to exit nano
7. Restart WSL and Windows preferably
8. cd build
9. cmake ..
10. make {TARGET} should be working again

Building targets is very slow

I was pretty shocked when my new i7 -10750 laptop took 25 minutes to build a single target. My old i3-4030 could do the same job in about 2.5 minutes. If you're also suffering from slow builds. Open an elevated PowerShell window and type

wsl -l -v

If you see your Linux distribution is using WSL 2, this is the problem. WSL 2 is quicker than WSL 1 for a lot of things. However, if your files are on a windows mounted drive in Linux, it is extremely slow. There are two options:

1. Put your files on the Linux file system
2. Change to WSL 1

Using the Linux file system (recommended)

To use the Linux file system, make sure the distro is running. Open File Explorer and navigate to \\wsl$. In that path you will find your distros listed. At this point, map a network drive to your distro. Inside the distro, you can find your home directory at /home/~username~/. Create your GitHub folders here.

If after this you have problems with writing to the directories from within VSCode. Open the application for your distro and type

sudo chown -R ~username~ GitHub

~Username~ is your root distro user that you created and GitHub should be the root folder for your GitHub repositories.

To switch back to WSL 1

To do this, in the elevated PowerShell window, you can see the name of your distro. Mine is Ubuntu-20.04, so I'll use that in this example. Simply type

wsl --set-version Ubuntu-20.04 1

and your distro will be converted to WSL 1. Once finished, reboot your system. Next time you compile a build, it will be faster.