iPhone Coding: Leopard-compatible Binary Toolchain Installer

Looking to compile software for the iPhone and iPod touch under Leopard? There are two approaches: You can download the latest toolchain svn from Google Code or you can use a legacy toolchain installer that just happens to work under Leopard.

Last night, Nicholas "Drudge" Penree pointed me towards a copy of Elliot Kroo's legacy 0.04 toolchain installer. This installer dates back to the "bad old days" of arm-apple-darwin-cc, before the better gcc version appeared. On the other hand, a working solution is a working solution so I'm not complaining.

After downloading, I mounted the disk image, ran the installer and then the "ooh shiny" program. To make this work, I had to install a copy of the iPhone disk as /usr/local/arm-apple-darwin/heavenly. There are various methods for getting a copy of your 1.1.1 disk floating around the net up to and including decrypting the install dmg from Apple. Google for details if you're unsure how to do this.

Next, since this is a VERY legacy install, I had to edit my .arm-cc-specs and fuss with them until they matched my system.

Finally, I grabbed a copy of my old libarmfp.dylib file and put everywhere I could think of until I got some existing projects to compile. I believe my final places to put it were /usr/local/arm-apple-darwin/heavenly/usr/lib/ and /usr/local/local.toolchain/heavenly/usr/lib but you'll have to hunt around on your own system to see where it fits. You'll be looking to put it in the same folder that has the working gcc_s_v6.1 library.

After this, I ended up with a working--albeit legacy--toolchain running under Leopard. I'll download and compile the new toolchain at some point but this gives me some much-appreciated breathing space before I need to do that.