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+# Prerequisites and Directory Setup
+
+This section deals with the packages we need on our system to cross bootstrap
+our mini distro, as well as the basic directory setup before we get started.
+
+## Prerequisites
+
+For compiling the packages you will need:
+
+* gcc
+* g++
+* make
+* flex
+* bison
+* gperf
+* makeinfo
+* ncurses (with headers)
+* awk
+* automake
+* help2man
+* curl
+* pkg-config
+* libtool
+* openssl (with headers)
+
+
+In case you wonder: even if you don't build any C++ package, you need the C++
+compiler to build GCC. The GCC code base mainly uses C99, but with some
+additional C++ features. `makeinfo` is used by the GNU utilities that generate
+info pages from texinfo. ncurses is mainly needed by the kernel build system
+for `menuconfig`. OpenSSL is also requried to compile the kernel later on.
+
+The list should be fairly complete, but I can't guarantee that I didn't miss
+something. Normally I work on systems with tons of development tools and
+libraries already installed, so if something is missing, please install it
+and maybe let me know.
+
+## Directory Setup
+
+First of all, you should create an empty directory somewhere where you want
+to build the cross toolchain and later the entire system.
+
+For convenience, we will store the absolute path to this directory inside a
+shell variable called **BUILDROOT** and create a few directories to organize
+our stuff in:
+
+    BUILDROOT=$(pwd)
+
+    mkdir -p "build" "src" "download" "toolchain/bin" "sysroot"
+
+I stored the downloaded packages in the **download** directory and extracted
+them to a directory called **src**.
+
+We will later build packages outside the source tree (GCC even requires that
+nowadays), inside a sub directory of **build**.
+
+Our final toolchain will end up in a directory called **toolchain**.
+
+We store the toolchain location inside another shell variable that I called
+**TCDIR** and prepend the executable path of our toolchain to the **PATH**
+variable:
+
+    TCDIR="$BUILDROOT/toolchain"
+    export PATH="$TCDIR/bin:$PATH"
+
+
+The **sysroot** directory will hold the cross compiled binaries for our target
+system, as well as headers and libraries used for cross compiling stuff. It is
+basically the `/` directory of the system we are going to build. For
+convenience, we will also store its absolute path in a shell variable:
+
+    SYSROOT="$BUILDROOT/sysroot"