How do I get the Ubuntu source code?

Question

Where can I find the source code for the latest Ubuntu release?

Also, how would I view the code? Would it just be lots of .cpp and .h files I could view in Visual Studio?

Answer 1

The source code for ubuntu is divided up by package - from a running ubuntu system you can easily retreive the source for any package by doing:

apt-get source (package name)

Otherwise, go to launchpad , and search up the package in question. For example, here's the download page for the source code for a specific version of curl: https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/curl/7.21.2-4ubuntu1

That said, it's a lot easier if you're on a Linux system already - the package sources are divided into an original source tarball plus ubuntu patches, so if you don't use apt-get source , you'll need to manually apply the patch to the source code. And new-style packages are even divided into multiple packages.

What's more, the packages are generally not designed to be cross-compiled from a non-Linux system. Even if you download them and open them in VS, you won't be able to build them from a Windows system.

Finally, note that not everything is in C and C++ - there are packages in just about any language you can imagine. But I suppose most of them could be opened in VS as text files :)

Note: If you really, really want all of it, and I can't stress enough how silly it would be to download everything just to start learning about the system, you can use the debmirror tool, available in ubuntu, to do this:

debmirror -a none \
          --source \
          -s main \
          -d lucid,lucid-security,lucid-updates \
          -r /ubuntu \ 
          --progress \
          -e http \
          -h archive.ubuntu.com \ ## or other ubuntu archive mirror
          destpath

This will be an absolutely huge download. Have several tens of GBs of space available. Note that this downloads only core packages - replace -s main with -s main,universe,multiverse,restricted to get everything.

Once you have the package files, you can extract the source by running dpkg-source -x on a .dsc file of interest.

Answer 2

1. archive.ubuntu.com
2. Most of them are .c and .h files (not sure about C++), but certainly not all (some perl, some Python, etc). There will also be a lot of documentation files that aren't saved with .txt, just like README and LICENSE .

Answer 3

You can pick the source image from here (16.04 in this case):
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/releases/16.04/release/source/

You can also choose the version you want.

Reference:
https://askubuntu.com/a/167472