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

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 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!

4 Answers

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 

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.

I've wrapped the script here by @kmhallen into a semi-automated debian package builder here:

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)

The toolchain is now only provided on their website:

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

cd /opt wget "" 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= 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