Installing and setting up renode

Welcome to the renode setup. I hope you know why you want to do this, it won’t take much time (depending on your internet speed) and I won’t be explaning anything other than the problems I faced and how to exactly do it.

# Go through the readme

The initial parts are chill. I am trying to install this on a linux machine, so I can just use the linux portable version:

mkdir renode_portable
wget https://builds.renode.io/renode-latest.linux-portable.tar.gz
tar xf  renode-latest.linux-portable.tar.gz -C renode_portable --strip-components=1

# Add it to path
cd renode_portable
export PATH="`pwd`:$PATH"

Then we need to install all related dependencies. At this point you should create a python virtual env and activate it.

# Dotnet part

Dotnet installation is a little painful. The first thing you need to do is check which debian version you are on:

cat ~/etc/debian_version

Here, bookwork/sid: 12, trixie: 13

Before you go on following the instructions for dotnet installation for these versions though, be aware that’s probably not gonna work.

For example, I use ubuntu 22.04LTS, which is built on top of bookworm but its NOT bookworm. It has its own kernels and all.

Going forward always ignore the debian instruction. I am ubuntu.

And .net doesn’t maintain support for my ubuntu 22.04LTS, but canonical does. They have a .NET backports PPA (Personal Package Archive) though some sources say that its insecure, but like… okay. We’ll see about this later.

Very luckily dotnet 10.0 has its EOL on November 14th, 2028, so I can install a version >= 6 (which is a requirement)

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:dotnet/backports
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install -y dotnet-sdk-10.0

Note that the documentation for installation doesn’t mention if you need the SDK or the runtime. I am assuming its the SDK cause they mentioned GTK as well. Maybe its a UI thing.

Ensure that it is in path, otherwise you’ll face trouble later

export PATH="$PATH:/home/purge/Desktop/fauvido/Stuff_new/renode_portable"

# Robot framework

To write and run test cases, Renode integrates with the Robot testing framework

Just install the requirements and make sure you have a python virtual env

pip install -r requirements.txt
python3 -m pip install -r tests/requirements.txt

Note you could always just run it in a docker container like they have mentioned but this is more fun

Now you can run renode! More on that soon…