Building OCaml 

From Sources 

• Fetch and extract OCaml from the homepage, and run ./configure && make world opt opt.opt && sudo make install.

• Make sure both ocamlopt.opt is in your default PATH.

This is all you need for a basic installation of Mirage. You can optionally also grab js_of_ocaml if you want to try out the Node.js backend.

Debian Packages 

Debian is unfortunately still stuck at OCaml 3.11, but there are some 3.12.0 packages here. The necessary GPG key must first be installed to use the package source.

# gpg -a --export 49881AD3 > glondu.gpg
# apt-key add glondu.gpg

Then add the following to /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb     http://ocaml.debian.net/debian/ocaml-3.12.0 sid main
deb-src http://ocaml.debian.net/debian/ocaml-3.12.0 sid main

And finally execute apt-get update:

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get upgrade

Ubuntu 

Ubuntu is even further behind than Debian, so building OCaml from source is recommended. If you really want to try the Debian packages, then first remove any existing OCaml packages via sudo apt-get remove ocaml-findlib camlp4-extra ocaml-native-compilers and sudo apt-get autoremove. There are then package conflicts with the following, which must be downloaded and installed separately:

• ncurses-bin_5.7+20100626-0ubuntu1_amd64.deb

• libncurses5-dev_5.7+20100626-0ubuntu1_amd64.deb

• libncurses5_5.7+20100626-0ubuntu1_amd64.deb

Download them, and run sudo dpkg -i *.deb on them. After that, the Debian instructions above should work. To install the tuntap device, required for unix-direct, do sudo modprobe tun.

OSX 

Package management on Mac OSX is somewhat fragmented, to say the least. We choose to use Homebrew, and you should begin by following its install instructions. It also depends on Ruby, and problems have been reported with the system installed version at least on OSX 10.6.x. Instead, install RVM, the Ruby Version Manager from here.

This will get you a working Homebrew installation. Next, you need to install git so that you can clone the main Homebrew repository and then setup Anil's patched Homebrew formula for findlib:

brew install git
cd $(brew --prefix)
git clone https://github.com/mxcl/homebrew
mv homebrew/.git .
git remote add -f avsm git://github.com/avsm/homebrew.git
git checkout new-findlib

Next, install the Homebrew packages for libev (required by the lwt library), OCaml and findlib:

brew install libev objective-caml findlib

Assuming you choose to put your source repositories in $SRC, then install my fork of the ODB OCaml package manager:

cd $SRC
git clone git://github.com/mor1/odb
alias odb=ocaml $SRC/odb/odb.ml

export OCAMLPATH=~/.odb/lib:$OCAMLPATH
export PATH=~/.odb/bin:$PATH

You should then be able to install the following packages with odb:

odb oUnit
odb bitstring
odb lwt
odb fileutils
odb oasis
odb batteris

cd ~/.odb/lib && mv oasis/ oasis.ignore
cd ../bin && mv oasis oasis.ignore

Finally, to be able to rebuild the Oasis setup for the various ocaml-* libraries, you need a patched version of Oasis:

cd $SRC
git clone git://github.com/mor1/oasis
cd oasis
ocaml setup.ml -configure
ocaml setup.ml -build
ocaml setup.ml -install

And that should be it! Pull, say, ocaml-dns and execute:

oasis setup-clean
oasis setup
make