Developing on a native Linux platform

These instructions assume you're running a varient of Ubuntu (like 12.04 LTS).

Install some packages

First, open a terminal. Click the ubuntu logo at the top left corner and type "terminal". Click the terminal screen icon.

• Tip: You may want to pin the terminal app for easy access. Do that by hitting the Windows logo key, moving your mouse over the terminal icon on the left vertical menu, right clicking, and chosing "Lock to Launcher". You can make the menu go away by hitting the escape key.

Next, run this command:

sudo apt-get install vim libncurses5-dev gcc make git exuberant-ctags

Setup your Linux kernel code repository

Once that finishes, run these two commands:

mkdir -p git/kernels
cd git/kernels

• Tip: mkdir creates directories, and cd changes the current working directory to a different directory. You can learn more about any command by reading the manual pages. Simply prefixing the command with the word "man", e.g. man mkdir.

Then use the revision control system called [http://git-scm.com/ git] to clone Linus Torvalds' repository:

git clone git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git

That's going to take a while. Why don't you read up on [http://lwn.net/Kernel/LDD3/ Linux Device Drivers] in the meantime?