Everything within the distribution can be built from scratch. However, you actually need a machine to build on. The faster the better, but something >1GHz CPU and >128MByte RAM is highly recommended.

As of this writing: on a Intel P4 dual 2.4GHz box with 2GByte Ram and SCSI-RAID, a parallel build for most in the AppKit tree will take around 3 hours. Building everything from AppKit and AppKitX needs about 8 hours.

As a minimum for software, you should have perl, make, and dpkg installed on your machine. dpkg is the Debian packet manager but some RPM based distributions have a dpkg package for compatibility. If the distribution you are using does not come with a dpkg package, you can build and install it from the source. dpkg is needed to install the packages inside the chroot build environment.

If you wish to build the static toolchain yourself, you need a complete C/C++ development environment (gcc, binutils etc.).

It is strongly recommended that you use a local copy of the CVS tree. The Pynix CVS is exported via cvsup. Cvsup basically allows you to have private branches of the main packages and is a bit more efficient when updating your local tree.

If you have your private copy on a NFS server, make sure you "hard"-mount it read-write on your compile machine. Read-write is needed to allow cvs to create lock files, "hard"-mounts seem to work around some problems with busy NFS servers.

To speed up incremental builds, the build scripts can use a copy of the apt-tree from your last build. Such a copy must be accessible via the filesystem (Disk or NFS).

To bootstrap your build, a static tool chain must be present. You can either build it from scratch or use the pre-compiled binaries from here. Using the pre-compiled tool chain speeds up the build process (~1/2 hour) and also avoids some strange problems.

Do not underestimate the disk space you need. A complete build (with intermediate cleanup) needs around 4GByte, expect much more without cleanup.