As promised, what I found so far: the following dockerfile yeilds a usable cross-compile environment, provided you use it with a Makefile. FROM ubuntu:xenial RUN apt-get update \ && apt-get install --yes \ vim \ build-essential \ git RUN git clone https://github.com/raspberrypi/tools RUN git clone https://gist.github.com/3873805.git /build WORKDIR "/build" CMD ["/usr/bin/make", "CC=/tools/arm-bcm2708/gcc-linaro-arm-linux-gnueabihf-raspbian-x64/bin/arm-linux-gnueabihf-gcc" , "HelloWorld"] # Seems I need a real makefile for the above to work. For cross compiling mysensors to work, hoever, you also need to properly seed the variable in configure, for it to work correctly. This is where I left off. Sources: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18007326/how-to-change-default-values-of-variables-like-cc-in-makefile https://bitbucket.org/mitchallen/pi-hello-cross-compile/src/master/ https://desertbot.io/blog/how-to-cross-compile-for-raspberry-pi https://github.com/mitchallen/pi-cross-compile/blob/master/Dockerfile https://github.com/mysensors/MySensors/blob/development/configure https://github.com/raspberrypi/tools/tree/master/arm-bcm2708/arm-bcm2708-linux-gnueabi/bin https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/linux/kernel/building.md https://www.mysensors.org/build/raspberry