How to install arm-none-eabi-gdb on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa)

Question

I tried to install arm-none-eabi-gdb as a part of gcc-arm-embedded. I added PPA:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:team-gcc-arm-embedded/ppa

and executed:

sudo apt install gcc-arm-embedded 

It responded with:

Err:8 http://ppa.launchpad.net/team-gcc-arm-embedded/ppa/ubuntu focal Release
  404  Not Found [IP: 91.189.95.83 80]

As far as I understand - gcc-arm-embedded doesn't have a version for Ubuntu 20. So I've changed release version for this PPA in Software & Updates to bionic so that I can avoid error 404.

Even though ubuntu 20 has libisl22, now I have unmet dependencies when I try to install gcc-arm-embedded:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
 gcc-arm-embedded : Depends: libisl15 (>= 0.15) but it is not installable
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.

I was unable to find a way to install requested version of libisl, as apt offers only two versions - libisl22 and libisl-dev and both are not accepted by installer.

I need advice on how to install arm-none-eabi-gdb. Thank you!

Answer 1

It turned out that ARM decided to make our life easier (sarcasm) by deprecating the use of PPA - their page at launchpad now has an anouncement: "... all new binary and source packages will not be released on Launchpad henceforth ...".

So, to make use of their latest arm-none-eabi-gdb you have to install gcc-arm-embedded manually.

Remove arm-none-eabi-gcc from your system:

sudo apt remove gcc-arm-none-eabi

Download latest version (Linux x86_64 Tarball) from their website, check its MD5. Unpack it into some directory. I used /usr/share/ :

sudo tar xjf gcc-arm-none-eabi-YOUR-VERSION.bz2 -C /usr/share/

Create links so that binaries are accessible system-wide:

sudo ln -s /usr/share/gcc-arm-none-eabi-YOUR-VERSION/bin/arm-none-eabi-gcc /usr/bin/arm-none-eabi-gcc 
sudo ln -s /usr/share/gcc-arm-none-eabi-YOUR-VERSION/bin/arm-none-eabi-g++ /usr/bin/arm-none-eabi-g++
sudo ln -s /usr/share/gcc-arm-none-eabi-YOUR-VERSION/bin/arm-none-eabi-gdb /usr/bin/arm-none-eabi-gdb
sudo ln -s /usr/share/gcc-arm-none-eabi-YOUR-VERSION/bin/arm-none-eabi-size /usr/bin/arm-none-eabi-size
sudo ln -s /usr/share/gcc-arm-none-eabi-YOUR-VERSION/bin/arm-none-eabi-objcopy /usr/bin/arm-none-eabi-objcopy

Install dependencies. ARM's "full installation instructions" listed in readme.txt won't tell you what dependencies are - you have to figure it out by trial and error. In my system I had to manually create symbolic links to force it to work:

sudo apt install libncurses-dev
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libncurses.so.6 /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libncurses.so.5
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libtinfo.so.6 /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libtinfo.so.5

Check if it works:

arm-none-eabi-gcc --version
arm-none-eabi-g++ --version
arm-none-eabi-gdb --version
arm-none-eabi-size --version

Answer 2

I've wrapped the script here by @kmhallen into a semi-automated debian package builder here: https://gitlab.com/alelec/arm-none-eabi-gcc-deb/-/releases

Installing a package like this means you can skip the tedious manual symlinks to put tools on the path, and just as importantly you can uninstall / upgrade to newer packages (assuming I remember to make more packages)

Answer 3

The toolchain is now only provided on their website: https://developer.arm.com/tools-and-software/open-source-software/developer-tools/gnu-toolchain/gnu-rm/downloads

After extracting, add the path to the bin folder to the system path:

cd /opt
wget "https://developer.arm.com/-/media/Files/downloads/gnu-rm/10.3-2021.10/gcc-arm-none-eabi-10.3-2021.10-x86_64-linux.tar.bz2"
tar -jxf gcc-arm-none-eabi-10.3-2021.10-x86_64-linux.tar.bz2
rm gcc-arm-none-eabi-10.3-2021.10-x86_64-linux.tar.bz2
export PATH="/opt/gcc-arm-none-eabi-10.3-2021.10/bin:$PATH"

Alternatively, here is a script to generate a Debian package and install it to the /usr directory. This way you don't have to export the path all the time, and it can be removed with sudo apt purge gcc-arm-none-eabi

#!/bin/bash

VER=15:10.3-2021.10-9
URL=https://developer.arm.com/-/media/Files/downloads/gnu-rm/10.3-2021.10/gcc-arm-none-eabi-10.3-2021.10-x86_64-linux.tar.bz2
echo "Creating gcc-arm-none-eabi debian package version $VER"

echo "Entering temporary directory..."
cd /tmp

echo "Downloading..."
curl -fSL -A "Mozilla/4.0" -o gcc-arm-none-eabi.tar "$URL"

echo "Extracting..."
tar -xf gcc-arm-none-eabi.tar
rm gcc-arm-none-eabi.tar

echo "Generating debian package..."
mkdir gcc-arm-none-eabi
mkdir gcc-arm-none-eabi/DEBIAN
mkdir gcc-arm-none-eabi/usr
echo "Package: gcc-arm-none-eabi"          >  gcc-arm-none-eabi/DEBIAN/control
echo "Version: $VER"                       >> gcc-arm-none-eabi/DEBIAN/control
echo "Architecture: amd64"                 >> gcc-arm-none-eabi/DEBIAN/control
echo "Maintainer: maintainer"              >> gcc-arm-none-eabi/DEBIAN/control
echo "Description: Arm Embedded toolchain" >> gcc-arm-none-eabi/DEBIAN/control
mv gcc-arm-none-eabi-*/* gcc-arm-none-eabi/usr/
dpkg-deb --build --root-owner-group gcc-arm-none-eabi

echo "Installing..."
sudo apt install ./gcc-arm-none-eabi.deb -y --allow-downgrades

echo "Removing temporary files..."
rm -r gcc-arm-none-eabi*

echo "Done."

Check if it works:

arm-none-eabi-gcc --version

Answer 4

The answer from Aleksander solved 99 percent of my issues, however after running make I got one error arm-none-eabi-objcopy : command not found. So I had do make one more symlink to get the files generated.

sudo ln -s /usr/share/gcc-arm-none-eabi-your-version/bin/arm-none-eabi-objcopy /usr/bin/arm-none-eabi-objcopy

I tried to add this as comment to the answer but I don't have enough points to do that.