Chapter 1. Overview
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## Chapter 1. Overview

## Introduction

The Open Powerline Toolkit (vanilla version) may be downloaded from https://github.com/qca/open-plc-utils.git by any interested party. An advanced version (chocolate version) may be downloaded from the Qualcomm Atheros Customer FTP site by parties having permission to do so. The chocolate version includes special programs that perform advanced engineering, production and maintenance tasks. Within this document, we refer to both versions, collectively, as “the toolkit”.

The toolkit contains C Language source code and GNU™ makefiles to compile many useful programs. It also includes Linux shell scripts that use these programs, in various ways, to interrogate, control and manage Qualcomm Atheros INT6000™, INT6300™, INT6400™, AR7400™ and later powerline devices. Qualcomm Atheros also provides a similar, but less extensive, toolkit for INT5500™ powerline devices.

The toolkit is intended for hardware engineers, verification engineers, field engineers and embedded software developers, consequently, programs are simple and compact. It is not intended for computer novices or retail users. Many customers embed a subset of toolkit programs in products for troubleshooting purposes.

The toolkit includes extensive HTML documentation and online man pages for users who cannot access installed man pages. HTML documentation starts with file docbook/index.html. Online man pages start with file docbook/toolkit.html. Qualcomm Atheros recommends that you add these two pages to your browser favorites for later reference.

All toolkit programs are written in C and have command line intefaces. The source code essentially conforms to ISO/IEC9899:1999. The source tree cleanly compiles using gcc or pcc on Ubuntu, OpenBSD and MacOSX. It also compiles under Microsoft C with the inclusion of special header files. The command line interface conforms to Section 12.2 Utility Syntax Guidelines of The Open Group Base Specification Issue 6 ( IEEE Std 1003.1, 2004 Edition).

The toolkit includes Microsoft Visual Studio .NET project files and solutions files to compile toolkit programs, plus the executable version (`.exe`) of each program and a set of Microsoft installation file (`.msi`) so that the toolkit package comes ready to install and run on any Windows host; however, Qualcomm Atheros does not provide support for Microsoft windows version of this toolkit. Toolkit documentation does provide Windows developers with special guidance on setting up their own Visual Studio projects and solutions, should they want to do that.

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