text:
Copyright (C) 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014,
2015 The Frugalware Developer Team.
Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2
or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation;
with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts.
A copy of the license is included in the section entitled "GNU
Free Documentation License".
1. Introduction
Before you start to read this document, you should know some important things about how to read it.
1.1. Things that you should really read
First there are some part of this document that you should really read, to understand how Frugalware works and how to administer it.
This introduction ;)
How to use pacman-g2.
How to manage services.
1.2. Running console commands
Throughout this document, there is boxed text which shows you console output. These are important and require quite some attention since most of the time you are expected to run them and get the same output.
$ echo foo bar
foo bar
This is how a console log look. Let's look at its details so you understand what it means.
echo foo bar part is what you should type and it's the command. The
following line
foo bar is the output of the previous command.
You may wonder what differentiates the command from the output. You see that in
front of the command there is a
$. This indicates that it's a command line,
but there is more meaning in this symbol. This symbol can change depending
on the user privileges required to run the command.
$indicates that any user can run the command. Most of the time it means you have to run it with your own user account.
user$indicates that the specified user's privileges are required to run this command. Usually this is necessary for security reasons.
You can get an interactive shell for this user, replacing user with the desired user name, by issuing:
$ su - user
#indicates that the
rootuser's privileges are required to run this command. Usually this is required to manage the system configuration.
You can get an interactive shell for root running:
$ su -
2. About Frugalware
Seeing this feast of wonderful code spread in front of me as a working system was a much more powerful experience than merely knowing, intellectually, that all the bits were probably out there. It was as though for years I'd been sorting through piles of disconnected car parts - only to be suddenly confronted with those same parts assembled into a gleaming red Ferrari, door open, keys swinging from the lock and engine gently purring with a promise of power…
The aim of creating Frugalware was to help you do your work faster and simpler. We hope you will like it. In this introduction, we would like to answer a few questions which were asked in several interview with Miklos, the founder of the project. You can reach the full list of articles that have been posted about Frugalware here.
2.1. Short
Frugalware is a general purpose Linux distribution, designed for intermediate users (who are not afraid of text mode).
2.2. Long
What branches does Frugalware have?
"We have a -current and a -stable branch. The -current branch is updated daily, and we provide security support for our -stable branch till the next release, for approximately 6 months."
What is "The Frugalware Philosophy" about?
"Briefly: simplicity, multimedia, design. We try to make Frugalware as simple as possible while not forgetting to keep it comfortable for the user. We try to ship fresh and stable software, as close to the original source as possible, because in our opinion most software is the best as is, and doesn't need patching."
What is the license of Frugalware?
"The license of Frugalware itself stands for the license of the buildscripts used for building Frugalware. That source is available under the GPL license here. Frugalware's original init scripts were written by Patrick J. Volkerding, creator of the Slackware Linux distribution. We release out additions under the GPL, but Patrick J. Volkerding's code is still under the BSD license. Frugalware also has a few side projects, like our pacman-g2 package manager, the Frugalware installer an so on. They are available under the GPL license, too. For more info about the license of the packages included in Frugalware, refer to the /usr/share/doc/*/COPYING files."
What package manager does Frugalware use?
"We have our own package manager, called pacman-g2. It stands for the second generation of the pacman-g1 package manager, as it was originally based on Judd Vinet's great work. The packages are simple .tar.bz2 files, pacman-g2 is written in C, unlike Slackware's shellscript-based package manager (which may be rather slow sometimes)."
How does Frugalware manage updating obsolete packages?
"We don't have any standalone program for updating packages as pacman-g2
manages this task too. To update your package database, use
pacman-g2 -Sy,
and to update your packages according the just synchronized package database,
you use
pacman-g2 -Su. To install package
foo with the necessary
dependencies directly from one of our ftp servers, you should issue
-S foo. For more information, refer to the pacman-g2 man page."
Is there any community support available for Frugalware?
"We have mailing lists, IRC channels and forums that can be used to
communicate with developers or with other users and to get help. You can reach
the list of mailing lists available here.
The IRC channels are on the Freenode network (server:
irc.freenode.net), the
discussion forums are available here."
Is there any commercial support available for Frugalware?
"No, there isn't for now, and currently it isn't planned, either."
For whom is Frugalware recommended to use?
"Frugalware is designed for intermediate users. Installing Frugalware doesn't require any magic, of course, but you should read some documentation if you don't know what a partition, an MBR (Master Boot Record), etc. is."
How to become a developer?
"Get involved! :) Download the FST (Frugalware Source Tree) using the
upd command, which is available in the pacman-tools package. Then start to
play with the FrugalBuild scripts, for a skeleton, refer to the
directory. Try to improve them, or write a new one for a currently unsupported
program. Then open feature requests in the Bug
Tracking System and attach your patches. From this point everything will come
naturally to you :)"
What do developers do?
"In short, what they want to, if they play a square game. They may maintain packages: building them if a newer version is available and update the FrugalBuild scripts to work correctly against a newer version. They can contribute a new build script for a previously non-existent package. They write documentation, fix bugs, provides support, or anything else in connection with the Frugalware community. If you want to help us, but you don't want to be a developers, you may help in translating Frugalware to your or other language. And, of course, we happily accept donations. :) More info here."
Who develops Frugalware?
"An amazing group of volunteers, who are motived by the users to do so. They also do it as a hobby, and they are always working on having up to date knowledge to make Frugalware even better for you."
Is Frugalware specialized in a certain purpose?
"No, it's a general purpose distribution, for desktops, mobile computers and servers."
Do you plan to release a live cd?
"Well, we have already a live cd, called FwLive. Currently it supports only i686, but an x86_64 version is also under development. You can find it in the standard release directories."
Does Frugalware support languages other than English?
"Yes, it supports all languages supported by the packages. If the init scripts, the setup or the documentation is not available in your language, then it simply means they haven't yet been translated."
What about Asian languages?
"Frugalware roughly supports Asian languages, but don't expect too much - using UTF8 is not the default where it is possible."
What architectures does Frugalware support?
"Currently we support x86 (Pentium Pro or higher), x86_64 (k8, aka. amd64) platforms and arm"
How are compressed the Frugalware packages ?
"FPM packages were originally .tar.gz packages, then a bit later we migrated to libarchive, which allowed bzip2 compression. Life was good, but then lzma was came, and I added support for libarchive, though others were not really interested in a migration, so we stick to .tar.bz2. A few months ago libarchive got support for the xz format (which is the successor of lzma), so we switched to it. pacman-g2 still support .tar.gz and .tar.bz2 as well, and the package extension is .fpm all the time to make it clear that it's a Frugalware package"
3. Quick reference
3.1. Informations
Package management: pacman-g2 (command line)
Linux kernel 2.6 (no 2.4 support)
The latest documentation is here.
Hardware requirements and list of supported architectures are in the Installation section of the documentation.
3.2. Features
Stable releases every 6 months
Security support for stable releases
Text mode installation
Optional graphical installation
Offline installation, netboot install supported
Prebuilt CD/DVD/USB hybrid, TFTP images are available
Localization supported whereever it's possible
About 5000 source packages and (as of March 2011) 6000 binary packages supported.
4. Installation
4.1. Hardware requirements
Given that the number of selected packages to install makes a lot of difference, there is no general answer. Though the followings are recommended for a default install:
Fearless attitude towards text mode
Some kind of installation media or set of downloaded packages
4.1.1. i686
A recent (read: Pentium 2 or higher) 32-bit Intel - or compatible - CPU
256MB of RAM
8GB of disk space (1GB for a minimal install)
4.1.2. x86_64
A 64-bit AMD - or compatible, so EM64T is fine - CPU
256MB of RAM
8GB of disk space (1GB for a minimal install)
4.1.3. arm
A Marvell Kirkwood platform (e.g. SheevaPlug, Seagate Dockstar, OpenRD, …)
32MB of RAM
1GB of disk space
4.2. Choosing installation flavor
Depending on your needs, there are different installers with different characteristics. You can choose which fits you the best.
4.2.1. Installing from CD
This image contains only a base system, which means the minimal set of packages so that later from the system you can install any other package. It may be handy in case the network installer does not recognize your network card.
Pros: Quick and easy to install, even if you network card does not work out of the box.
Cons: You need to knowledge on how to extend the installed system to the average requirements.
4.2.2. Installing from DVD
This contains all packages from the main groups.
Pros: a full offline installation is possible.
Cons: Large amount of data must be downloaded, presumably some unnecessary packages too.
4.2.3. USB isohybrid image
The ISO images you would use to burn the CD now also double as the USB image as well. They are installed the same way as the old USB images were. All you do is copy them directly to the USB stick's device node.
Pros: No need to burn any CD, you can reuse the media.
Cons: You have to be able to boot from USB.
|Writing the image to a USB stick will destroy all the data on the drive. Be careful when specifying target devices / partitions othervise you can easily loose data.
The following command will install the image to the USB stick on any recent Linux system:
|Pay attention to see what /dev/sdX device your USB stick is, for
example by having a look at the contents of the
/dev/disk/by-id/ directory!
# dd if=frugalware-<version>-<arch>-cd1.iso of=/dev/sdX
You might be able to use a similar tool (like this) on Windows systems as well, but it seems only supports partitions not whole disks. If you can find a way to successfully write an USB image under Windows, please share with us.
4.2.4. TFTP image
This is a floppy image, for a very special case:
you want to do a network installation
you don't want to / can't use CDs
you don't want to / can't boot from an USB stick
you can boot from a network card, but your BIOS does not supports so
you have a floppy drive
Pros: In some cases this is the only way you can install Frugalware
Cons: You need a bootable network card and a working TFTP server
4.2.5. Fwbootstrap (self-contained chroot)
This is a tarball which has to be downloaded and unpacked. Mostly useful for developers who can compile packages in this build environment on a non-Frugalware host system.
Download the tarball
$ wget ftp://ftp5.frugalware.org/packages/frugalware/pub/frugalware/\ frugalware-stable-iso/fwchroot-<version>-<arch>.tar.bz2
Unpack it
$ tar xvjf fwchroot-<version>-<arch>.tar.bz2
Enter the chroot.
$ cd fwchroot-<version>-<arch> $ ./fwbootstrap
Use it (build a package or two)
Exit from the shell and fwbootstrap will unmount the necessary dirs for you.
You can get a list of installed packages in the chroot with issuing the pacman-g2 -Q command.
4.2.6. A manual bootstrap
So you want a complete Frugalware installed into /mnt/foo. First of all, you must have a running Frugalware where you are able to do
# pacman-g2 -Sy core base -r /mnt/foo
which installs the core and base pkgs into it. But beware:
$ pacman-g2 -Qo /etc/profile.d/lang.sh
No package owns /etc/profile.d/lang.sh
$ pacman-g2 -Qo /etc/fstab
No package owns /etc/fstab
so you have to copy or forge them by hand.
A script is available to somewhat automate this bootstrap method.
|Manual bootstrap is the only way to install the arm port at the moment. Follow the qemu and real device arm-bootstrap howtos if you need more info.
4.3. Obtaining a source media
A Frugalware installation media can be obtained from several sources. You can download it freely via HTTP, FTP or rsync. You can also grab it via bittorrent, see Linuxtracker for example.
The following examples explains how you can get the iso images. You have to replace
$arch$ and
$media$ to get the wanted iso image.
Via FTP:
$ wget ftp://ftp3.frugalware.org/mirrors/frugalware/pub/frugalware/\
Via HTTP:
$ wget http://www5.frugalware.org/linux/frugalware/pub/frugalware/\
Via rsync:
$ rsync -avP rsync://rsync4.frugalware.org/ftp/pub/linux/distributions/\
frugalware/frugalware-$version$-iso/frugalware-$version$-$arch$-$media$.iso ./
More info and the full list of mirrors can be found at our download page.
4.4. Using packages from CD/DVD
You have a skeleton system installed from CD/DVD, and you want to use the packages from the media afterwards. There are two methods.
First is the easiest, but needs quite a lot of space (and caution not to use pacman-g2 -Scc ;) ): mount the media and install all the .fpm's found in frugalware-i686 (or frugalware-x86_64) dir to /var/cache/pacman/pkg.
Second is a bit more challenging, but more usable. Add a new line to /etc/pacman-g2/repos/frugalware before the other Server lines:
Server = file:///media/dvd/frugalware-i686
On x86_64, use this one:
Server = file:///media/dvd/frugalware-x86_64
The media should be mounted on /media/dvd, or change the Server lines appropriately.
Also you can only install packages then from the given media, so you have to insert the first CD if you install a package from the first CD and so on. This is something you should pay attention for.
4.5. The installation process
|Do not worry if you misconfigured something! Just press <Cancel> in the next dialog and you will see the menu. Just go back to the given part and you can reconfigure it.
After downloading and burning the CDs/DVD, insert the first CD/DVD to your CD/DVD drive, and reboot your computer. In the grub menu, you can disable the framebuffer, if a framebuffer with resolution 1024x768 is not suitable for your graphics card or monitor. After that, grub loads the kernel and the initrd image.
At the first dialog, you should select your language. If your language is not on the list, you should choose a language fits for you. You can change these options after installing too.
The next dialog is only a greetings. Just push <Enter>. Now it is time to select your keyboard type. Pick your one, then hit <OK>!
After selecting your keyboard map, setup searches for installation media automatically.
If you use a netinstall image follow these sub-steps. Otherwise jump to the partitioning point!Note
These steps sets up your network options during the install. When you finished installing Frugalware the installer will ask for network options again. Those options will be the installed system's options.
Now you should select your connection type. The installer uses the netconfig utility. You can also find the documentation for netconfig in this documentation. See the part called: Networking.
After setting up the network you can choose a mirror for downloading the packages. The installer will try other mirrors too. This feature is useful when you have got a fast local mirror or something similar.
The next step is partitioning. Frugalware setup displays a list of your hard disks, you should choose one of them to partition it with a program. You can select the partitioning program in the next dialog, currently fdisk and cfdisk are included. You should create at least one partition with type Linux, and it is recommended to create a swap partition (with type Linux swap). The swap size should be 500-1000MB. When you have finished partitioning, press <Continue>.
The following list displays your swap partitions, here you can choose which swap partitions are allowed to be used by Frugalware. Then setup formats your swap partitions. If you have no swap partition just press <Cancel>!
In the next window, you should select your root partition first, then you can choose if you wish to format it or keep the existing filesystem on it. After selecting the root partition, you can setup other Linux partitions, optionally format them, and set their mount points. Using a separate partition is supported for /boot, /home, /var, but not for /usr (see here for more info).
After having your Linux partitions mounted, you should do the same with your DOS/Windows ones. Setup will display a list of them, if any exists. You should simply choose a mount point for them here.
Now it is the time to select if you want to use expert menus or not. If you choose expert menu after selecting the categories you will be able to pick packages one-by-one from the selected categories. So if you select apps and base the installer will give you a list of packages in apps, when you finished picking the packages you will see the packages in base. After picking them the installation begins.
If you choose the normal menu (it's the default) then you will only see the groups, but not the individual packages. So after picking the groups installation starts.
The next step is to select package categories. If you will not use KDE or GNOME, you may probably want to disable them. In most cases, it is not a good idea to disable other categories. If you selected the expert menu you will see the package list after this dialog.Note
If the group list is empty that means you probably misconfigured your network. Please go back and try to fix it. You can also test your connection if you press Alt+F2 and try to ping some servers.
Setup will install the packages your selected from the first CD. When it is done, you will be prompted to insert the next Frugalware install. If you have only one disc, feel free to abort installing packages, you can install anything else from the net later.
5. Upgrading from Frugalware 1.9 to 2.0
5.1. Preamble
The aim of this howto is to show how you can upgrade a Frugalware-1.9 (Arcturus) system to Frugalware-2.0 (Rigel).
5.2. Deprecated package removal
Some packages will not gracefully be removed because of strict dependencies. If you encounter a message such as this during a system upgrade:
:: foobar-subpkg: requires foobar=1.0.0
Then you will need to perform this command for each of the removed packages:
pacman-g2 -Rd <PACKAGES>
<PACKAGES> must be replaced by the names of each of the removed packages. This must be done prior to the system upgrade.
5.3. pacman-g2
The new release comes with an improved
pacman-g2, you should install it
pacman-g2 -Sy pacman-g2
5.4. Upgrading the system
Now it's time to upgrade the system itself:
pacman-g2 -Su
:: Starting local database upgrade...
You will be asked to replace some packages automatically. These are normal and you are expected to answer Y to these questions (or just hit ENTER).
After this, the list of to-be-upgraded packages is displayed. Just hit enter and wait. Make some tea, it can take a while. :-)
5.5. Updating config files
pacman-g2 does not touch configuration files in case you customized
them. You should run
find /etc -name '*.pacnew'
and update each configuration file based on the
.pacnew version. Once
you're done with one, you should remove the
.pacnew file.
5.6. bind update
The caching example configuration we provide in the
bind package is updated,
named.ca is renamed to
named.root. If you build your real configuration
on top of this example, make sure you update your
5.7. The reboot
Since the kernel is upgraded, too, you have to reboot your machine.
6. Basic configuration
6.1. Introduction
After the installation of the packages, Frugalware setup will configure your new Frugalware system. If you installed the packages manually, then you'll have to perform those configuration steps manually.
|If any problem occurs, there is a debug console on
tty4, you can see
that by pressing
Alt-F4. You can switch back by hitting
The first step is to install GRUB onto your hard disk. There are four options here: installing to the MBR, the root partition, a floppy or simply skipping. Installing to the MBR is the good choice if you want Frugalware to manage your computer's booting. The root is a good idea if you want to install GRUB into your root partition. In this case, GRUB will not modify your existing boot manager. Floppy is a good idea for example if you don't have any boot manager installed, but you want to leave your MBR unmodified.
6.3. Kernel modules
After the installation of GRUB, the installer will configure your kernel modules. This means that an information dialog appears, but nothing more.
6.4. Accounts and passwords
After module configuration, you should change the root password. This is very important as there is no default password. If you skip this step, anybody will be able to login as root.
After this step, you can create a regular (also known as non-root) user.
It's highly recommended to create one, and log in as a regular user.
If a command should be run as root, you should use su or sudo under console,
gksu or
kdesu under X.
6.5. Network
After this, setup will configure your network settings. Setup simply runs the netconfig utility, which is described in the Networking section.
6.6. Timezone
If network installation is done, we should configure the system's time. This means two actions. First, you should decide if the hardware (BIOS) clock is set to Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). If yes, select yes here. If the hardware clock is set to the current local time (this is how most PCs are set up), say no here. If you are not sure what is this, you should answer no here.
6.7. Mouse
The next step is to configure your mouse. The configuration will take effect on the console mouse services (gpm) and on the X server. The setting is done by xconfig later.
6.8. Graphical interface
If you have installed an X server (by default xorg), the setup will run xconfig. For more information on xconfig, see the section Graphical interface (X11).
7. Pacman-G2
7.1. Basics
Frugalware comes with Pacman-G2 package manager. Pacman-G2 is a fork of the
not-yet-released cvs version of the complete rewrite of pacman-g1 by Aurelien
Foret (the old monolithic pacman-g1 is written by Judd Vinet). See the
README for
details. If you want to do anything with packages, you'll always have to use
pacman-g2 command. Here are some basic actions with
Actions usually used with remote installation from an FTP server:
# pacman-g2 -Sy
Updates the package database. Before searching for packages or installing them from an FTP server, you will have to use this command.
# pacman-g2 -Su
Upgrades all packages that are currently installed but a newer version of the package is available on the FTP server.
# pacman-g2 -Syu
The combination of the above two, that is the command most users use daily.
$ pacman-g2 -Sup
Prints the URL of all packages that pacman-g2 should download. This way you can download the packages anywhere and then just copy them to /var/cache/pacman/pkg. This is very useful if you have limited bandwidth at your computer, but you can access high bandwidth elsewhere.
# pacman-g2 -S sendmail
Installs sendmail with all of its dependencies from the FTP server. If it conflicts with any package, you will be asked if pacman-g2 is allowed to remove them.
$ pacman-g2 -Ss perl
Searches in the package database (on the FTP server). This example will probably display the perl package and all perl modules. Regular expression based search is also supported.
Of course, you can treat packages as normal files, and you can manually add/remove/etc them. Here are some examples:
# pacman-g2 -U zsh-4.2.1-1.fpm
Adds (or if it's already installed, upgrades) the zsh package, which is located in the current directory.
# pacman-g2 -R qt
Removes the qt package.
$ pacman-g2 -Qs perl
Shows every installed packages whose name contains the string perl.
Generally, if you want to turn off checking for conflicting files, you should use the -f parameter, and if you want to turn off all dependency checking, you should use the -d switch.
$ pacman-g2 -h
This displays all the switches we discussed above, and a lot more. Once again, these are only the basics. You can also use pacman-g2 -Sh or similar to get help on a particular task.
|Full documentation for pacman-g2 can be reached by issuing
man pacman-g2.
7.2. Apt - pacman-g2 cross reference
For those who are familiar with the apt package management tool, here is a quick cross-reference.
|Apt command
|Pacman-G2 command
Refresh the package database:
apt-get update
pacman-g2 -Sy
Upgrade currently installed packages:
apt-get upgrade
pacman-g2 -Su
Install a new package:
apt-get install foo
pacman-g2 -S foo
Remove a package:
apt-get remove foo
pacman-g2 -Rc foo
Search in the full package database:
apt-cache search foo
pacman-g2 -Ss foo
Install a package from a file:
dpkg -i foo.deb
pacman-g2 -A foo.fpm
Clean the package cache:
apt-get clean
pacman-g2 -Sc
8. Networking
8.1. Initializing the network card
In most cases, configuring your network card will be done automatically by
udev. This means that during every system boot your network card will be
detected, and the necessary modules will be loaded. If you want, you can load
your network card's module manually by editing the
file and put the module in the blacklist by editing
Configuring any interface on your card will be the task of the netconfig
utility. Initializing your card ends here.
8.2. The netconfig utility
Configuring your network settings is done by the netconfig utility.
First, we have to give a name to your computer. The name must consist of at least two parts, separated by a dot (.).
In the next dialog, you should choose how your machine connects to the network. If you have an internal network card and an assigned IP address, gateway, and DNS, use static to enter these values. If your IP address is assigned by a DHCP server (commonly used by cable modem services, not equal to DSL services), select dhcp. In case you've got a DSL connection (eg. ADSL) choose the dsl option! Finally, if you do not have a network card, choose the lo choice. The lo is also the correct choice if you are using a PCMCIA network card.
When you set up the network, the first question will be the interface you want to set up. It is usually eth0, but it can differ when you set up wireless interfaces for example. If you set up a wireless card netconfig will also ask your ESSID and encryption key.
If you chose static, you must give your IP address, the netmask of your local network, your gateway address (you may leave it blank) and the IP address of your primary name server (you can add more nameservers later by editing the /etc/resolv.conf file) and then the configuration is finished.
If you chose dhcp, you can optionally give your dhcp hostname, however, netconfig will not ask more questions about your network, since all other data will be provided by the DHCP server.
If you chose dsl, you must give your username, something like email@example.com. Then you'll have to specify the network interface (usually eth0) through which the ADSL connection script will try to communicate with your ADSL modem. Then enter your password twice.
If you chose lo, you don't have to answer any questions.
Finally, netconfig will write all your network configuration files. If you want to edit your settings by hand, the interface information is stored in the /etc/sysconfig/network directory. There is only one file there called default in most cases. It's because you can set up more than one profile. It's very useful if you have a laptop so that you can set up options for all networks you use.
8.3. Basic firewall configuration
Frugalware comes with a firewall configuration working out of the box. This allows all outgoing connections, and incoming packets for established connections. It does not allow normal incoming packages for any ports. The firewall configuration is at /etc/sysconfig/firewall.
|You will not find this file if you have not installed iptables package as this is an iptables firewall.
Let's see an example: you would like to allow others to ssh into your computer. Edit /etc/sysconfig/firewall, remove the hashmark (#) from the beginning of the line under the # ssh description, and restart the firewall:
# service firewall restart
The same applies for Apache or any other services.
If you would like to have any advanced firewall settings, configure your firewall as root with iptables then save your config as root with:
# iptables-save > /etc/sysconfig/firewall
|It will overwrite your existing configuration! It is strongly recommended to make a backup of /etc/sysconfig/firewall before saving your settings.
9. Graphical interface (X11)
9.1. Configuring your graphics card
If you install X, a /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d directory will be created for you, containing XOrg configuration fragment files. In most cases the default configuration will be enough for you, but you can place your own fragments there if you want to manually fine-tune some of the settings.
A common problem is to use a keyboard layout different to the default of the locale, for example you have a non-English locale, thus the default keyboard layout isn't English, either, but you want to have such one. In that case you need to edit the evdev configuration:
# vi /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/10-evdev.conf
and change the
xkb_layout option there to
us, for example.
9.2. 3D acceleration, binary drivers
If there is built-in 3d acceleration support for your card in X, UDev will detect the necessary drivers and X will enable support for them.
If you have an NVIDIA card, you probably need the manufacturer's binary drivers. Obtaining the NVIDIA binary driver is fairly simple:
# pacman-g2 -Sy nvidia
9.3. Allow root login in KDM/GDM
By default, no root login is permitted on the GUI, the recommended way of running graphical programs as root is to use gksu or kdesu.
To enable it anyway, the following lines should be edited:
For KDM (/etc/kde/config/kdm/kdmrc)
modify to
For GDM (/etc/gdm/gdm.conf)
modify to
10. Sound
10.1. Configuring the sound card
Frugalware uses the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (ALSA) subsystem for sound cards. For older applications, the Open Sound System (OSS) compatibility modules are loaded, but Frugalware does not contain native OSS support.
Finding and loading the necessary module for your sound card is fairly simple. The process is mostly the same as setting up your network card. During every boot, the hotplug scripts will detect your sound card, but, of course, you can take the automatically loaded module to blacklist, and load it manually by editing /etc/sysconfig/modules.
10.2. Volume configuration with alsamixer
By default, your sound card can be very loud. You can use
alsamixer to set
the volume of your card. Use the < and > keys to mute a channel, up and down
keys to set the volume and left or right keys to switch to another channel. You
can quit alsamixer by hitting the Esc key.
From now, during shutdown, Frugalware saves your settings, but you can store or load them any time with the
# service alsa save
and the
# service alsa load
11. Printing
Frugalware uses the Common Unix Printing System (CUPS) for handling printers and to manage printing.
11.1. Before you start
Here comes a few advice depending on what manufacturer made your printer.
11.1.1. Hewlett-Packard
You need hpijs at least, but you can also install hplip for advanced HP support. Also if you have got some priter&scanner machine it's a good idea to use hplip.
11.1.2. Canon
Most likely you need one of the bjfilter packages. The following list tell you which package you should use.
bjfilter-2.2: Canon Pixus 550i / 850i / 950i (i550 / i850 / i950) and iP90 Driver
bjfilter-2.4: Canon Pixus 560i / 860i / 960i (i560 / i860 / i960) Driver
bjfilter-2.5: Canon Pixus iP3100 / iP4100 / iP8600 (and Pixma iP1000 / iP1500) Driver
bjfilter: Canon Pixus iP2200 / iP4200 / iP6600D / iP7500 / MP500 Driver
Please report us if your printer does not listed or listed, but in the wrong line!
11.1.3. Epson
If you own an Epson Color InkJet Printer you need the pipslite package. After installing the package do not forget to restart cups and start the ekp daemon!
sudo service cups restart
sudo service ekpd start
sudo service ekpd add
|Till now nobody confirmed that this package actually works.
11.1.4. Samsung
The Samsung printer driver for cups is called splix. After installing it and restarting cups you will find your printer when you add it in cups.
11.2. Configuring the printer
Open your favorite Internet browser and go to http://localhost:631. This is the Web interface of CUPS.
Select Administration from the top menu. If a username is required, type root, and give your root password.
You can do almost everything here in connection with printing. In our example, we will add a new local printer.
Click Add Printer, type in a name and optionally fill the Location and Description lines, then click on continue.
Select Device, in most cases it is Parallel Port #1 for older models and one of the USB ports for newer ones. I you have got a USB printer cups will write the printer name next to the proper port.
On the next page, select your vendor and your printer type (the driver/filter).
To set up a remote Windows share with password, give a string like this for location (the share name is the printer's assigned name on the remote system): smb://user:passwd@Netbios_Name_or_ip_address/Share_name
Notice that, when you view the printer configuration, the credentials will not be shown but will be used.
11.3. My printer is not listed
If your vendor or printer type isn't listed in the wizard, you have to check the OpenPrinting site whether if is supported under Linux or not. Usually it's enough to install the proper printer driver (see above) or gutenprint. After installing do not forget to restart cups:
# service cups restart
If it's not on the page mentioned above, then try to Google after. If listed but said to be "paperweight", then there is nothing to do. If it is supported and said to be working on the site, then please file a bug report with your printer details. While we fix the bug, you can install the driver (the ppd) by yourself.
On the left side, select Printer Listings. Then select your device's vendor and proper type. On the results page, select download PPD. After download, there will be a file named someting_that_ends_with.ppd.
Save the PPD file in the directory /usr/share/cups/model/. The PPD file doesn't have to be executable, but it should be world-readable and should have the file extension ".ppd".
If you do not want to search ppd, try to install foomatic-filters-ppds package. It has a bunch of ppd files for various printers.
Then restart the CUPS service:
su -c \'service cups restart\'. The driver
installation is now completed, now you can add your printer via the web
interface. A good howto can be found at
11.4. Multiple pages on a single sheet
This is also known as n-up printing. If an application doesn't support it natively, print the document to a file as PostScript and use psnup:
$ psnup -2 print.ps > print2page.ps
The first option specifies the number of pages stacked on one physical sheet, the second is the filename of the original one-sided document, and the last is the n-up (two-sided) document. You can then print it with
$ cupsdoprint -P nameofprinter foo.ps
or open it in your favourite PS viewer.
11.5. Troubleshooting
If something goes wrong, check out CUPS log at /var/log/cups. There is a verbose error log and an access log, too.
12. The hotplug subsystem
12.1. udev
The /dev directory under Frugalware is a ramdisk. Every device node is created automatically during the system boot by the hotplug subsystem, more specifically, by udev. It means there won't be unnecessary device nodes in /dev, but it also means that if you create a device node manually, it will exist only until the next shutdown/reboot.
If you want to force Frugalware to create a device node "manually" during each
boot, you must create a device file under
/lib/udev/devices: it will be
copied on each boot automatically.
The udev needs sysfs, so it will only work with the 2.6.x kernel series. Do not try to run udev on Frugalware with kernel series 2.4.x.
12.2. Pen/Thumbdrives
Pendrives (also known as thumbdrives, or USB keys) are well-supported through the hotplug scripts and udev. If you insert a pendrive into the USB slot, udev will create a device node for it in /dev. Most pendrives contain only one partition and their filesystem is vfat. In most cases, the pendrive will behave like a SCSI disc. It means, you can find the pendrive under /dev/sda and its first partition under /dev/sda1. Adding the following line to /etc/fstab:
/dev/sda1 /media/pendrive auto defaults,noauto,user 0 0
will allow users to mount their pendrive if the device node exists (if the device is inserted into the slot).
If you use KDE, Gnome or XFCE4 they will handle automatic mounting of
such devices. You should not edit /etc/fstab as automounting will not
work for you.
For blackbox, fluxbox, englightenment, e17 and other smaller window
manager users there is
ivman for automounting, but it may not work as
well as in KDE, Gnome, XFCE4.
See also the automounting part of the documentation.
12.3. Digital cameras
Typically, there are two types of digital cameras. Some of them support both access methods, others use only one of them. First, most of the cameras can be treated as a pendrive (USB Mass Storage device), you can mount them and copy the pictures from them easily.
Other cameras support the Picture Transfer Protocol (PTP). You can
grab the pictures from them (and do lots of other actions) with
if your model is supported. (If it's not available on your system, a
su -c \'pacman-g2 -S gphoto2\' will install it onto your system.)
12.4. Automounting: D-BUS, HAL and Ivman; Gnome and KDE
D-BUS is a simple IPC (inter-process communication) library based on messages. HAL is a hardware abstraction layer which uses D-BUS. Ivman is based on HAL and uses pmount ("policy mount"), which is a wrapper around the standard mount program which permits normal users to mount removable devices without an existing /etc/fstab entry.
Ivman is a daemon to automount CD-ROMs and DVDs when inserted in a drive, or play audio CDs or video DVDs automatically. It is 100% userspace, so it is a safe replacement for submount.
If you want to change the default settings, all config files are located in /etc/ivman. They are plain XML files, just read them, everything is quite self-explanatory.
Automounting also happens with KDE and Gnome, but their respective VFS implementation does that, not ivman. Ivman is useful for other windowing systems where is no support for such a feature.
13. The init scripts, bootup
13.1. About the kernel
The Linux kernel is in the
kernel package. We use as few patches as possible
to stay close to the vanilla kernel. We also use
splashy instead of well known
bootsplash. The kernel contains compiled-in support for most IDE controllers,
but all low-level SCSI drivers are compiled as a module. If Frugalware's kernel
doesn't contain built-in support for your controller, you can compile your
own kernel. Don't worry, it's fairly simple.
After setup is finished, before hitting ENTER to reboot, switch to
tty2by pressing
Alt-F2and press ENTER to get a shell.
Change your root directory to /mnt/target:
# chroot /mnt/target
The source of your kernel (with additional patches applied) can be found at
/usr/src/linux. So go to the
/usr/src/linuxdirectory and enter the configuration menu by typing
make menuconfig. Inside it, select the driver you don't want to compile as a module anymore, and exit from the menu with saving changes.
Compile your kernel with the
makecommand. This may take several minutes.
Copy your new kernel to
/bootby typing the following command:
# cp /usr/src/linux/arch/$yourarch$/boot/bzImage /boot/vmlinuz
On i686 and x86_64,
$yourarch$has to be replaced by x86.
13.2. Init scripts and services
In Frugalware, init is provided by systemd, its service files are always called something.service and they are located in /lib/systemd/system. They are used to setup the environment and manage system services.
The services are UNIX daemons that provide various functionality. The spectrum of their actions is very large. Synchronizing your system clock, running your webserver, running the virus scanner, all of these are services and they offer much much more.
In the following examples we will explain how to alter the running state of
a given service. You will have to replace
$service_name$ with the
wanted service name, for example
crond.service. As you will see the
syntax is simple, and you may get more help looking at the
manual doing:
$ man systemctl
|Later in this document you will see how to alter the configuration of these services so that they follow your needs. You should better learn how to control them, but don't be afraid, the syntax is really simple, and you will learn it in less then a minute.
13.2.1. Controlling a service execution
Services can be started, restarted and stopped, so that you can control what your system has to offer.
To start a service, simply do:
# systemctl start $service_name$
To restart a service, simply do:
# systemctl restart $service_name$
To stop a service, simply do:
# systemctl stop $service_name$
As you can see, controlling a service execution is pretty simple.
13.2.2. Controlling a service execution on system boot
Controlling the automatic execution of services on system startup is not much more difficult.
To add a service for automatic execution on system startup, simply do:
# systemctl enable $service_name$
To delete a service from automatic execution on system startup, simply do:
# systemctl disable $service_name$
To check if the service is enabled, simply do:
# systemctl is-enabled $service_name$
13.3. System boot, targets
If you don't pass any extra init=/path/to/init parameters to it, the kernel will start /sbin/init as the final step of the kernel boot sequence. According to /etc/systemd/system/default.target, init will run:
each service file required by
each service file required by the default target. This is set to
graphical.targetby default. Here is the list of available targets:
halt.target = halt
emergency.target = similar to 'init=/bin/sh'
rescue.target = single user mode
multi-user.target = multiuser mode (text mode)
graphical.target = multiuser mode, X11 with KDM/GDM/XDM (default Frugalware target)
reboot.target = reboot
emergency.target has the advantage that you can boot the system
without a reboot later.
If X11 is configured, prefdm.service will start one of the desktop managers, as configured in /etc/sysconfig/desktop.
13.4. GRUB gfxmenu
Frugalware comes with a nice graphical grub menu (thanks to SuSE's gfxmenu developers). If you don't like it, you can disable it by commenting out the gfxmenu initialization line in /boot/grub/menu.lst.
So for example:
gfxmenu (hd0,5)/boot/grub/message
#gfxmenu (hd0,5)/boot/grub/message
13.5. Splashy
Frugalware uses splashy to display a nice splash screen and a progress bar instead of text messages during the boot procedure. Splashy is completely user-space, so there is no need for patching the kernel. If you dislike it or want to switch it off for whatever reason add nosplashy for your kernel parameters in /boot/grub/menu.lst. For example:
kernel (hd0,2)/vmlinuz root=/dev/hda5 ro quiet nosplashy
14. How to contribute
If you appreciate our work, please consider contributing. Below are examples of ways in which you can help the Frugalware project. If you want to help in a way that's not described here, please tell us of your idea in an email to the Frugalware users' mailing list, or add an entry to the Frugalware forums.
14.1. Donations of money
Donations of money are welcome and will be used to cover costs such as domain name registration, hosting costs (hardware, bandwidth etc). If you want to donate, please use the "Donation" link on the Frugalware home page.
14.2. Translation
Comprehensive, multi-lingual documentation is very important to us because we want Frugalware to be available to as many people as possible. If you have the required linguistic knowledge, you could help translate various pieces of work. These include our own applications, documentation, web site etc.
14.3. Application packaging
In the Bug Tracking System, are requests for packages, from Frugalware's users. The process of making packages is well documented in the http://frugalware.org/docs/stable/index-devel [Frugalware Developer Documentation], and with some GNU/Linux experience, you could contribute in that way. Existing package maintainers are always available to help you, especially if you're new to packaging.
14.4. Developing
Frugalware has several of its own applications, including: * An ncurses installer; * A GUI installer (fwife); * A GUI package management tool (gfpm); * A command-line package manager (pacman-g2); * A GUI runlevel manager (gservice).
Help in further developing and enhancing these applications is welcome.
14.5. Donating hardware
By sending us some wanted hardware (see donations), you can make testing packages easier, or speed up the package creation process within a specific architecture.
14.6. Artwork
We usually update our artwork (background images, grub splash, desktop manager themes, window manager splashes and so on) for each release. If you are skilled in this area, you're welcome to join the artwork team.
14.7. Support
If you have time and knowledge, monitor the forums, read the mailing list posts, hang around on IRC and try to answer peoples' questions.
14.8. Find bugs
If you find bugs, you can help by submitting well-written bug reports, see the Reporting Bugs section for more info.
15. The Frugalware Bug Reporting HOWTO
15.1. Introduction
The aim of this HOWTO is to explain how to choose a task name and what to include in a feature request/bugreport to help Frugalware developers speed up the process of fixing a bug or fulfilling a feature request.
15.2. Where
The URL of our Bug tracking system is:
15.3. General
Use the search function before opening a task, as there may be a task for your bug/feature. In that case just add a comment such as "I can reproduce this, too." or "I would enjoy this feature, too."
There are a few topics which are often requested/reported but we have a good reason not fixing/implementing them. You can see a list of such topics in the wiki.
If you'd like to report an outdated package, first check that it is not already listed on this site. If the package is listed, please do not report it as we know there is a new version. We will update it as soon as possible in this case.
Write bugreports in English, please. This is the only language all developers speak.
15.4. Bug reports
Please include the following things, unless you know what you are doing:
Description of Problem - never say "does not work", quote the error message
Steps to reproduce the problem
Actual Results
Expected Results
How often does this happen?
Additional Information
The default arch is i686 and the default version is -current. If these are not true, don't forget to change them!
If you report a -current installer bug, then -current is probably not enough, please specify the snapshot date.
If you found a security bug, then use the [SEC] prefix in the task name.
15.5. Feature Requests
Please don't request more than one package in a feature request. Open a task for every package. (Of course you don't have to open task for dependencies if they are also missing from our packages, but please list them if you can.)
If you request a package, please include:
The name of the application (yes, "more games" is not enough!)
The URL of the application
Optionally a short note about why you think this package would be interesting for others, too
If you have a FrugalBuild for the package already, then upload it as an
attachment after opening the task. In this case, please prefix your task name
[FB], because this way it will be reviewed sooner.
Alternatively, you can post your FrugalBuild to the
frugalware-devel mailing
list for review, that can be handy if you want to submit more and more
buildscripts - finally to become a developer if possible. Opening a task for
your FrugalBuild is still fine if you want us to maintain it after the initial
version is accepted.
Please don't link other distribution's buildscripts when you request a package. That information is useless for us in most cases and if you don't include such links, you make our life easier.
15.5.1. Do not request
Please don't request custom kernels. We try to use as few patches as possible.
man kernel.sh as a reference on building your own kernel using various
patchsets. A
tutorial is
available as well. Really, building such a kernel usually requires a
buildscript of only 5 (five) lines!
15.6. Pacman-g2 problems
If you get a crash from our package manager, then we need a backtrace from gdb. Here are the instructions to get a backtrace:
Find the command line that triggers the crash. For example: pacman-g2 -Sy
Get the pacman-g2 git repo and compile it with debug symbols enabled:
$ git clone http://frugalware.org/git/pub/other/pacman-g2/pacman-g2 $ cd pacman-g2 $ sh autogen.sh $ ./configure --enable-debug $ make
Then run pacman-g2 in gdb and get the trace:
$ cd src/pacman-g2 $ sudo libtool gdb ./pacman-g2 > run -Sy
When pacman-g2 crashes, get the trace by typing bt. Here is an example:
Program received signal SIGSEGV, Segmentation fault. 0x0805035e in pacman_sync (targets=0x0) at sync.c:354 354 *p = 1; (gdb) bt #0 0x0805035e in pacman_sync (targets=0x0) at sync.c:354 #1 0x08054594 in main (argc=2, argv=0xbfee1844) at pacman.c:609
Attach the output of bt to your bugreport.
15.7. Fixed in git
Your feature request/bugreport may be closed with a "Fixed in git …" message. Git is our source control management software (just like CVS). If your task is not considered to be critical, then it will be fixed/implemented only in git, without increasing the package release. This means that it will be automatically included in the next release.
16. Mobile computers
16.1. Battery, buttons, thermal management
Notebook users are usually interested in the state of their battery. Getting the power button and the lid's sensor of its closed state to emit events is also nice. Some notebooks only shut down their continously running fans and operate only if needed if the thermal module is loaded.
Usually these modules are automatically loaded by
udev. If it does not
do so for you, then add the following lines to /etc/sysconfig/modules
to get modules loaded at system startup:
The next task is to enable the acpid service:
# service acpid add
Then the easiest way is to reboot, or if you don't want do do so:
# modprobe battery
# modprobe ac
# service hald stop
# service dbus stop
# service acpid start
# service dbus start
# service hald start
The only remaining task is to start a client: if you're on console, try the acpi command, or the relevant applet of your favorite window manager.
16.2. Conserving power
The major consumers of power in a notebook are the LCD (differences in size and brightness level can mean a lot), the CPU, hard drives, wireless transceivers like WiFi, Bluetooth, Infrared and the GPU if you have a powerful one.
You can conserve a fair amount of power if you lessen the brightness level of the LCD screen. Some notebooks can remember two settings of this level, one when the equipment operates from battery and another when powered from AC.
The CPUs have some sort of power saving capabilities, the most basic is "CPU throttling". Common on Intel mobile Celeron CPUs, only ACPI is needed. Klaptop has a setting for it, where you can specify the level.
Letting the HDD spin down gives little extra battery operating time, but frequent spinups (data access) and spindowns wears the disk. This is only useful in situations where there is no frequent need for data on HDD like holding a presentation.
16.3. Hibernation
Hibernating your computer can cause data loss or severe filesystem damage if things go wrong. It's highly advised that first, you should consider if hibernating is worth the effort at all. Try it on a fresh installation first, instead of a production system.
From kernel/suspend.c:
* If you have unsupported (*) devices using DMA...
* ...say goodbye to your data.
* If you touch anything on disk between suspend and resume...
* ...kiss your data goodbye.
* If your disk driver does not support suspend... (IDE does)
* ...you'd better find out how to get along
* without your data.
* If you change kernel command line between suspend and resume...
* ...prepare for nasty fsck or worse.
* If you change your hardware while system is suspended...
* ...well, it was not good idea.
* (*) suspend/resume support is needed to make it safe.
You have been warned. If you are still not discouraged, read on!
First, you need to create a swap partition (if you don't have any yet). You have to add an extra resume=/dev/swappart kernel parameter to /boot/grub/menu.lst. For example, on my machine the old line was:
kernel (hd0,2)/boot/vmlinuz ro root=/dev/hda3 quiet
The new line:
kernel (hd0,2)/boot/vmlinuz ro root=/dev/hda3 quiet resume=/dev/hda2
After the above are done, you must reboot. The hibernation can be started with:
echo shutdown > /sys/power/disk; echo disk > /sys/power/state
and next time you boot your kernel it should resume. For more info, look at
/usr/src/linux/Documentation/power/swsusp.txt. It requires the kernel
documentation, which can be installed issuing the
pacman-g2 -S kernel-docs
command as root.
17. Packages
The following sections describe the configuration of some packages.
17.1. amavisd-new
For the first initial setup you may want to use our
amavisconf utility.
From amavisd-new-2.5.2-1 we no longer use a random uid/gid, but dedicated ones. Because of this amavis service will not start if you have it installed before, so you have to correct this by issuing these commands:
groupmod -g 40 amavis
usermod -u 40 -g 40 amavis
chown -R amavis:amavis /var/lib/amavis
chown -R amavis:amavis /var/lock/amavis
You should chown any other amavis-owned stuff you may have lying around, these are only the default ones.
17.2. android-studio
Setting up Android SDK :
# repoman upd
# repoman merge android-sdk
# pacman-g2 -A android-sdk-r11-1-i686.fpm
You should open a new shell to have android-sdk/tools/ in the path. After that, just type "adb" (not "./adb") as mentionned in following links.
If you want to use your Android phone as a proxy, see these pages :
with Proxoid : http://code.google.com/p/proxoid/wiki/installationLinux
Proxoid for french users/HTC G1 : http://blog.archambeau.info/?p=9
with Tetherbot : http://graha.ms/androidproxy/
17.3. apache
17.3.1. How to configure Apache
These steps require root privileges, so use su - to get a root shell.
The Apache server isn't started by default. You can change this with the
# service httpd add
We don't want to reboot, so start it manually:
# service httpd start Starting Apache web server (no SSL) [ OK ]
You have finished if you don't need SSL support.
17.3.2. Setting up SSL support for Apache
Creating the certifications:
# cd /etc/httpd/conf/ # sh mkcert.sh Signature Algorithm ((R)SA or (D)SA) [R]: Here we can accept the default RSA signature algorithm first. Then we have to fill out some fields. There are quite a few fields but you can leave most of them blank. If you enter '.', the field will be left blank. 1) Country Name (2 letter code) [XY]: Give the 2-letter code of our contry (for example US) 2) State or Province Name (full name) [Snake Desert]: We type our state. 3) Locality Name (eg, city) [Snake Town]: The name of our city. 4) Organization Name (eg, company) [Snake Oil, Ltd]: Our organization's name. 5) Organizational Unit Name (eg, section) [Webserver Team]: Our section's name. 6) Common Name (eg, FQDN) [www.snakeoil.com]: Important: Give a real address here, otherwise you'll get warnings in your browser! 7) Email Address (eg, `name@FQDN') [`email@example.com']: I usually give the email address of the webmaster here. (email@example.com) 8) Certificate Validity (days) [365]: In most cases, one year will be good. Then, we should choose the version of our certificate: Certificate Version (1 or 3) [3]: The default 3 will be good, so just hit enter. In the next step we can encrypt our private key: Encrypt the private key now? [Y/n]: The keys will not be readable by users, so we can leave this step out.
So the following files are created:
/etc/httpd/conf/server.key (keep this file private!) /etc/httpd/conf/server.crt /etc/httpd/conf/server.csr
Enable SSL in /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf: Open the file with your favorite editor, and search the followings:
# Uncomment this if you want SSL support! #<IfModule mod_ssl.c> # Include /etc/httpd/conf/extra/httpd-ssl.conf #</IfModule>
Uncomment them.
Now we should restart Apache:
# service httpd restart
Then we can check if the task was successful:
$ elinks https://localhost/
This should show the default homapage, received via SSL :)
17.3.3. Self-signed Apache certificate
This must be done as root.
# openssl genrsa -des3 -out server.key 1024
Enter "foobar" twice as passphrase.
# openssl req -new -key server.key -out server.csr
Enter "foobar" when asked for passphrase, answer the questions. Leave "challenge password" "and optional company name" empty.
# cp server.key server.key.org
# openssl rsa -in server.key.org -out server.key
Enter "foobar" when asked for passphrase.
# openssl x509 -req -days 365 -in server.csr -signkey server.key -out server.crt
# cp server.crt /etc/httpd/conf/
# cp server.key /etc/httpd/conf/
# service httpd stop
# vi /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf
Uncomment the marked three lines around line 1044 (look for "SSL support").
# service httpd restart
Don't forget to open port 443 on your firewall, if any. (Based on How to create a self-signed SSL Certificate…, tested on frugalware-current 2007-02-14.)
17.4. asciidoc
Asciidoc has a number of configuration files under
/etc/asciidoc and
it's easy to get lost in that directory.
Regarding pdf (dblatex) generation, here are some options you can set:
If you want to avoid the "PDF by dblatex" picture on the front page, edit
<xsl:param name="doc.publisher.show">0</xsl:param>
If you want to avoid the "Revision History" page, add:
<xsl:param name="latex.output.revhistory">0</xsl:param>
If you want to avoid the "Contents" page, add:
<xsl:param name="doc.toc.show">0</xsl:param>
If you want to avoid the front page, sadly you can't do it from a configuration file, but for now you can edit
/usr/share/dblatex/latex/style/docbook.sty. Change the
\maketitlemacro to:
17.5. autojump
cd command that learns
Please read the official README or the manual.
Add the line :
source /etc/profile
~/.bashrc or
~/.zshrc if it isn't already there.
17.6. avahi
|If you have rlocate installed on your system, Avahi will not run and therefore Zeroconf functionality in programs will be disabled. If you want this functionality, then please uninstall rlocate.
Also, If you are using iptables, please uncomment this line in /etc/sysconfig/firewall:
#-A INPUT -p udp -m udp --dport 5353 -j ACCEPT
After that do not forget to restart iptables with:
# service firewall restart
17.7. b43-fwcutter
Since version 2.6.24, the bcm43xx driver is deprecated, replaced by the b43 and b43legacy modules.
Before b43legacy works you need to extrac the firmware: wget http://www.lwfinger.com/b43-firmware/broadcom-wl-5.100.138.tar.bz2 wget http://downloads.openwrt.org/sources/wl_apsta-126.96.36.199.o sudo b43-fwcutter -w /lib/firmware broadcom-wl-5.100.138/linux/wl_apsta.o sudo b43-fwcutter -w /lib/firmware wl_apsta-22.214.171.124.o || Fdie
The module should be loaded automatically, in case it isn't, you can load it manually:
# modprobe b43
# modprobe b43legacy
You must bring the device up with ifconfig before doing any other configuration steps.
# ifconfig ethX up
Since the channel must be set manually, first do a scan:
# iwlist ethX scan
Then you can set it:
# iwconfig ethX channel Y
Finally set your essid:
# iwconfig ethX essid "myessid"
17.8. ccache
After you installed
ccache, it won't be enabled by default.
First, you need to determine who is allowed to use
ccache. You have to
add each user to the
ccache group. If you want to allow using
from chrooted builds, then you need to add the
fst user:
# usermod -a -G ccache fst
Second, you need to somehow let the build system to use
ccache, and
not the compiler directly. If you use
makepkg, this is enabled by
default (you can disable it with the
-B option). If you build
manually, then you are on your own, though usually there are two ways to
do so:
Tell the configure script to use a different compiler:
$ CC=/usr/bin/ccache ./configure
Modify path to use the fake compiler provided by
export PATH=/usr/lib/ccache/bin:$PATH
17.9. cryptsetup-luks
Follow these steps to when using
17.9.1. Creating
# cryptsetup luksFormat /dev/partition
# cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/partition label
# mke2fs -j /dev/mapper/label
# mount /dev/mapper/label /mnt/label
17.9.2. Mounting
Of course later you don't have to use
luksFormat and
# cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/partition label
# mount /dev/mapper/label /mnt/label
17.9.3. Umounting
# umount /mnt/label
# cryptsetup luksClose label
17.9.4. Encrypting your home partition
|You have need to install the
sharutils package to do the followings!
List these modules in
Move all data from
/hometo a secure place (in this example
# cp -arvx /home /media/sda1/
/home(in this example
/dev/hda6) and fill it with random numbers:
# umount /home
# dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/hda6
Create the encrypted partition:
# cryptsetup -y luksFormat /dev/hda6
Here we will be asked for a password which will be necessary to access
at boot time.
Open the encrypted partition and create its file system (
ext3in this example):
# cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/hda6 home
# mkfs.ext3 /dev/mapper/home
Mount the home partition and copy the contents of original home:
# mount /dev/mapper/home /home
# cp -arvx /media/sda1/home /home
Edit the home related line in
/dev/mapper/home /home ext3 noatime 0 0
/etc/rc.d/rc.cryptscript with the following content:
/usr/sbin/cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/hda6 home
/bin/mount /dev/mapper/home /home
Enable it:
# ln -s /etc/rc.d/rc.crypt /etc/rc.d/rcS.d/S15rc.crypt
You have to delay the splash screen, so that you can type your password before the splash appears:
# mv /etc/rc.d/rcS.d/S03rc.splash /etc/rc.d/rcS.d/S15rc.splash
(It will ask the password between the lvm and the splash service.)
Now the system can be restarted and the password will be asked to access home partition boot-time.
|The English keyboard map will be used at that point of the boot process.
17.10. cyrus-sasl
17.10.1. Configuring
This mini-howto helps you to install the saslauthd server using postfix which
will authenticate using users and passwords from
First install the necessary packages:
# pacman-g2 -S postfix saslauthd
Enable sasl in postfix's config by appending the following lines to
smtpd_sasl_auth_enable = yes
smtpd_sasl_local_domain = $myhostname
smtpd_sasl_security_options = noanonymous
You may want to append
broken_sasl_auth_clients = yes
as well.
Put the following lines to
pwcheck_method: saslauthd
mech_list: PLAIN LOGIN
/etc/sysconfig/saslauthd by changing the following lines:
options="-a shadow"
Now you can start saslauthd by
service saslauthd start
as well as enabled in by default on startup:
service saslauthd add
id postfix and see if the
daemon group is listed. If not, then add
postfix to the
daemon group:
usermod -G daemon postfix
Finally restart postfix:
service postfix restart
17.10.2. Verifying
We test it using telnet. We need perl to generate the string for the SASL authentication:
$ perl -MMIME::Base64 -e 'print encode_base64("vmiklos\0vmiklos\0secret");'
Then use telnet:
$ telnet host.com 25
Trying ip...
Connected to host.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
220 host.com ESMTP Postfix
ehlo my.dhcp
AUTH PLAIN dm1pa2xvcwB2bWlrbG9zAHNlY3JldA==
235 2.0.0 Authentication successful
221 2.0.0 Bye
Connection closed by foreign host.
17.11. dante
17.11.1. Configuration
In most cases you have a socks server (you can create one easily using ssh, see the documentation of the openssh package), and you want to route all traffic through it. Here is the config you need:
route {
from: 0.0.0.0/0 to: 0.0.0.0/0 via: 127.0.0.1 port = 8080
proxyprotocol: socks_v4
17.11.2. Testing it
Try for example:
$ socksify irssi
When you connect to a server, others will see that you're connecting from the server, not from your own host.
17.12. ddclient
Please configure /etc/ddclient/ddclient.conf before running ddclient!
Samples for common configurations can be found in: /usr/share/doc/ddclient-$package_version/sample*
Additional details and instructions can be found in: /usr/share/doc/ddclient-$package_version/README
Once you have finished configuring the ddclient.conf file, you can start ddclient as a daemon by running as root, the following command:
# service ddclient start
17.13. dhcp
If you are in trouble setting up your dhclient, use the following options. These are quite good defaults:
request subnet-mask, broadcast-address, time-offset, \
routers, domain-name, domain-name-servers, \
host-name, netbios-name-servers, netbios-scope;
timeout 20;
script "/sbin/dhclient-script";
17.14. dspam
To populate the DSPAM database, you need to follow several steps.
First create a database. Login to the mysql command prompt.
$ mysql -u root -p mysql> CREATE database dspam;
Next, you need to create a dspam user. At the same MySQL prompt:
mysql> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON dspam.* TO dspam@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'passwd';
Replacing passwd with your chosen password.
Optimizing the datebase:
If you want a space optimized db do:
$ mysql -u dspam dspam -p < /var/lib/dspam/mysql/mysql_objects-space.sql
If you want a speed optimized db do:
$ mysql -u dspam dspam -p < /var/lib/dspam/mysql/mysql_objects-speed.sql
Enter the password you set in the previous step, and the database should be populated.
Remember to edit /etc/dspam/dspam.conf accordenly
If you want to use the postgresql, sqlite3 or Berekely DB4 backends you can find instructions in the dspam documentation.
17.15. fuse
Fuse is a virtual filesystem "helper" which makes possible to mount unusual things as a filesystem. It is achieved by using a simple program, which runs in user space, to provide data that can be represented by the fuse kernel module as a filesystem. The interpreter program is a less complex one than a kernel-space module, which is much harder to write. In Frugalware, regular users of a given box can mount filesystems by fuse. First as root, let's install the tools needed:
# pacman-g2 -S fuse
Now, having the base of fuse, we need to install the programs for each specific filesystem type. To get a hint on what is available, you can issue the following command:
$ pacman-g2 -Ss fuse
The two most used (ftp, ssh) plugins can be installed by running the following command. Beware, the ftp fs is a perl module, and it seems a bit memory hungry / buggy / slow so therefore it might be replaced by CurlFtpFS in the future.
# pacman-g2 -S fuseftp sshfs-fuse
Then, you can mount a remote dir with sftp access as a regular user doing:
$ /sbin/mount.fuse sshfs#YOURUSERNAME@SERVER:/REMOTEDIR /LOCALDIR -o rw,OTHEROPTIONS
You can also unmount it as a regular user doing:
$ fusermount -u /LOCALDIR
17.16. gammu
17.16.1. Configuring
You need to create your ~/.gammurc:
port = /dev/ttyUSB0
connection = fbus
/dev/ttyUSB0 with your serial port device and
fbus with the
appropriate protocol name if you are not a Nokia user. Check if you have write
access to the device, you need to be a member of the
uucp group.
Once you think you're done, check your setup:
$ gnokii --identify
It should print your
IMEI number so that you'll be able to check if
really found your phone or there is a problem.
17.16.2. Creating a backup
You probably use
gammu to make a backup of your phone.
This involves two steps:
Backing up your SMSes
$ gammu --backupsms backupsms.txt
The rest of your phone.
$ gammu --backup backup.txt
You may find an alternative format more human-readable for SMSes:
$ gammu --geteachsms > eachsms.txt
See the manual page for more tricks!
17.17. git
17.17.1. gitweb
If you want to set up a web interface for your git repositories, then:
install the
/etc/gitweb.confso that
$projectrootwill point to the repository directory
apacheso that the
gitwebconfiguration will be included.
17.18. gnome-bluetooth
For have a full bluetooth support with gnome install obex-data-server # pacman-g2 -S obex-data-server
17.19. grub2
It is no longer acceptable to edit your grub configuration manually since
upgrading to grub2. Instead, it is advised to insert any customizations
you require in
/etc/sysconfig/grub-config and
17.20. help2man
The most common usage of this applications is something like this:
$ help2man -n "<oneliner description>" -S Frugalware -N ./<binary> |sed 's/\\(co/(c)/' ><binary>.1
17.21. hostapd
Configuration examples can be found in /etc/hostapd. You must edit the following files located in /etc/hostapd to configure hostapd:
hostapd.allow hostapd.conf hostapd.deny
17.22. kexec-tools
|kexec works just like reboot, so please save your data before using it!
Loading the new kernel:
# kexec -l /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.18-fw1 --append="ro root=/dev/hda3 quiet resume=/dev/hda2"
Booting it:
# kexec -e
17.23. keychain
First of all, we have to install package called keychain. (
pacman-g2 -S
In the next step we have to create a new key. A key stands from two
parts, a public and a private part. It means two different files in your
~/.ssh/ directory.
Your key is generated by a program called ssh-keygen. It's a part of openssh package. Run ssh-keygen -t dsa! You'll see something like this:
voroskoi@kavics~$ ssh-keygen -t dsa
Generating public/private dsa key pair.
Enter file in which to save the key (/home/voroskoi/.ssh/id_dsa):
Enter passphrase (empty for no passphrase):
Enter same passphrase again:
Your identification has been saved in /home/voroskoi/.ssh/id_dsa.
Your public key has been saved in /home/voroskoi/.ssh/id_dsa.pub.
The key fingerprint is:
ac:47:93:29:d2:c4:e1:85:47:5c:c1:36:93:74:e9:08 voroskoi@kavics
It'll generate for us the two parts of the key. The program asks where do you want to save the keys, it's good to simply push an enter. After that You have to type in the passphrase of the key two times. It's really important to chose a hard passphrase. It should contain lower-/uppercase characters, digits, possibly special characters too. The length must be at least 10 characters! We have to type in this passphrase only once after every restart we shouldn't choose an easy one.
If everything works fine, then we have an id_dsa and an id_dsa.pub file
in our
~/.ssh/ directory.
voroskoi@kavics~/.ssh $ ls -la
drwx------ 2 voroskoi users 5 2005-04-13 13:39 ./
drwx--x--x 38 voroskoi users 67 2005-04-13 13:24 ../
-rw------- 1 voroskoi users 736 2005-03-01 21:25 id_dsa
-rw-r--r-- 1 voroskoi users 605 2005-04-11 04:18 id_dsa.pub
-rw-r--r-- 1 voroskoi users 230 2005-04-11 04:26 known_hosts
Now, we would like to use our newly generated key. We have to do the following:
$ scp ~/.ssh/id_dsa.pub username@remote_machine:
$ ssh username@remote_machine
$ cat id_dsa.pub >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys
$ rm id_dsa.pub
$ exit
Good to know, that this time(I mean when we run scp and ssh commands) we can't use our key's passphrase, so we have to use our password on the remore_machine. If it's done without any mistake on next login the remote_machine will ask for our key's passphrase.
And here comes keychain. In openssh package there is a program called ssh-agent. You can store keys in ssh-agent. Keychain just makes easier using of ssh-agent and adds some new features.
This time i assume that we use bash. If we would like to use keychain
with an other shell, then we can use man keychain:-) So, let's take out
favourite editor and add the following lines to
~/.bash_profile file:
keychain -q id_dsa
[ -f $HOME/.keychain/$HOSTNAME-sh ] && source $HOME/.keychain/$HOSTNAME-sh
17.24. ksplice
ksplice is handy in case there is a serious security fix and you don't want or can't afford rebooting your system immediately.
Let's pick an example, the kernel-2.6.28-6anacreon3 update, which added CVE-2009-2692.patch.
First update FST so that you will have the patch:
# repoman upd
Now create a working dir:
$ cp -a /usr/src/linux/ ~/linux-source
$ cd ~/linux-source
$ mkdir ksplice
$ cp /boot/config ksplice/.config
$ cp /boot/System.map ksplice/
$ ln -s ~/linux-source ksplice/build
$ cp /var/fst/stable/source/base/kernel/CVE-2009-2692.patch .
Now create the ksplice update:
$ ksplice-create --patch=CVE-2009-2692.patch ~/linux-source
Then apply it:
# ksplice-apply ksplice-st4dt4bg.tar.gz
To view all applies updates, or a specific one:
# ksplice-view
# ksplice-view --id=st4dt4bg
To revert one:
# ksplice-undo st4dt4bg
17.25. lesspipe
For syntax highlighting support in
less via the
lesspipe wrapper, you must
install the
source-highlight package.
17.26. lmsensors
lmsensors is a hardware monitoring tool which is able to read thermal and voltage values and fan speeds from the sensor chips of your motherboard. Before running sensors you have to run sensors-detect as root to initialize them. It will autodetect your hardware and define which kernel modules you need to get it working properly, and tell you how to autoload them during boot.
So if you want to use lmsensors run :
and say YES at end of sensors-detect to write
/etc/sysconfig/lm_sensors and run :
systemctl enable lmsensors systemctl start lmsensors
17.27. lvm2
17.27.1. Creating
Here is a mini-HOWTO, a longer one is available here.
First if you are on a setup cd, you need to
modprobe dm-mod
vgchange -a y
The first loads the device-mapper support for the kernel, the later enables the existing volume groups. This is automatically done for you on an installed Frugalware system.
You need to decide what physical partitions to use for LVM. In this mini-HOWTO
/ is
/dev/hda1 and we create a big
/home partition using
/dev/hda2 and
Let's initialize them for use by LVM:
pvcreate /dev/hda2 /dev/hdc1
Create a volume group titled
vgcreate vg /dev/hda2
Extend it with
vgextend vg /dev/hdc1
Then we can create a logical volume with a size of 400G titled
lvcreate -L400G -nhome vg
Create a filesystem on it as usual, ie. for ext3:
mke2fs -j /dev/vg/home
And now the only task is to mount it as usual, ie:
mount /dev/vg/home /mnt/target/home
17.27.2. Extending
You already saw how to extend a volume group. Extending a logical volume is a bit more complex, but still easy.
If you use ext3:
umount /mnt/target/home
lvextend -L+900M /dev/vg/home
resize2fs /dev/vg/home
mount /dev/vg/home /mnt/target/home
|According to the manpage of resize2fs, it would have support resizing without umounting, but this does not seem to work.
If you use reiserfs:
lvextend -L+900M /dev/vg/home
resize_reiserfs /dev/vg/home
17.27.3. Removing
To remove a logical volume:
lvremove /dev/vg/home
To remove a physical volume from a volume group:
vgreduce vg /dev/hdc1
To remove a volume group:
vgremove vg
That's it.
17.28. mailman
There is no any kind of http server in mailman's depends. It's because they are not needed to get a working mailman. Of cource if you want to provide archives and so don't forget to install a http server.
17.29. man-db
If you like coloured man-pages then you can enable that feature by issuing
# chmod +x /etc/profile.d/man-colors.sh
It is handled as a configuration file, so feel free to edit the colors in that file if you want.
17.30. monit
You may want to forge a config file for yourself as /etc/monit/monitrc to be able to properly use Monit. Consult the online docs for details:
After doing so you should issue a
systemctl enable monit.service command to
make use of this service.
17.31. munin
From munin-1.2.5-2 we no longer use a random uid/gid, but dedicated ones. Because of this munin service will not start if you have it installed before, so you have to correct this by issuing these commands:
groupmod -g 47 munin
usermod -u 47 -g 47 munin
chown -R munin:munin /var/lib/munin
chown -R munin:munin /var/www/html/munin
chown -R munin:munin /var/log/munin
chown -R munin:munin /var/run/munin
You should chown any other munin-owned stuff you may have lying around, these are only the default ones.
17.32. nss-mdns
To enable IPv4 multicast DNS lookups, append mdns4 to the hosts line in /etc/nsswitch.conf. Use mdns6 for IPv6 or mdns for both.
17.33. openssh
17.33.1. Forwarding ports
# ssh -L 8000:localhost:80 server.com
After this you can access server.com:80 at localhost:8000 even if server.com:80 is not accessible from your machine.
17.33.2. Socks proxy
Many mobile users have the following problem: they have to use an unencrypted wireless lan and they want to access webservers which does not support https. There is an easy solution for this: you transfer data to a server in an ssh tunnel then the data can be transferred to the server unencrypted in a wired network. This is much more secure. Set up the socks proxy on localhost:8080:
$ ssh -D 8080 server.com
Then configure your webbrowser to use the proxy, for example in firefox, select
Manual proxy configuration and then set
SOCKS Host to localhost,
Port to
|Don't forget to clear other proxy fields! (HTTP, SSL, FTP, etc.)
17.34. php
You should set
in /etc/php.ini in order to use php-cgi.
17.35. pootle
In most cases you want to use pootle with mysql and apache. See here on how to configure them:
Also read these pages if you're upgrading from Pootle 1.x:
17.36. postfix
17.36.1. Using a relay host
These are the basic steps to set up Postfix to use SMTP Authentication to send mail through a relay host.
Set up a password maps file (
/etc/postfix/sasl_passwd) as follows:
mail.ispserver.com username:password
# chown root:root /etc/postfix/sasl_passwd
# chmod 600 /etc/postfix/sasl_passwd
# postmap /etc/postfix/sasl_passwd
Append the following lines to
relayhost = mail.ispserver.com
smtp_sasl_auth_enable = yes
smtp_sasl_password_maps = hash:/etc/postfix/sasl_passwd
smtp_sasl_security_options =
Finally reload postfix:
# postfix reload
That should do it!
17.37. postfixadmin
This package relies on correct install of postfix's virtual tables and it
needs to be configured before usage. Be sure to read upstream's
/var/www/postfixadmin/INSTALL.TXT in order to accomplish the setup
or upgrade. You should also take care of configuring apache to be able to
use the web-based interface.
17.38. postgrey
To use postgrey, put something along the lines of
smtpd_recipient_restrictions =
check_policy_service inet:127.0.0.1:60000
in your /etc/postfix/main.cf (postfix 2.1 or newer is required.)
17.39. pptpd
I was asked to set up VPN using PPTP. A much secure way to setup it up is using IPSec, more details here. Also you could use ssh+pppd, but that's rather problematic on platforms other than Unix.
Setting up the server
The big problem here is that most outdated HOWTO starts with patching your kernel and ppp. This is no longer needed!
Requiements: You need kernel>=2.6.15 or newer (Frugalware 0.4 or higher is OK). Also you need ppp>=2.4.2.
Also probably these are already installed on your system, let's see the new package: pptpd. Install it with the usual
# pacman-g2 -S pptpd
Probably this is done if you're reading this HOWTO :-)
Here comes my /etc/pptp.conf:
$ grep -v '^\(#\|$\)' /etc/pptpd.conf option /etc/ppp/options.pptpd logwtmp localip 10.0.0.88 remoteip 10.0.0.89-127
10.0.0.88 is the internal address of the server, 10.0.0.89-127 is the range that can be used by the pptp clients.
Then let's see that referred /etc/ppp/options.pptpd:
$ grep -v '^\(#\|$\)' /etc/ppp/options.pptpd name pptpd refuse-pap refuse-chap refuse-mschap require-mschap-v2 require-mppe-128 proxyarp debug lock nobsdcomp novj novjccomp nologfd
After everything works fine, you can remove the "debug" line from the config.
Then add at least one user:
# cat /etc/ppp/chap-secrets ## client server secret IP addresses mylogin * stupidpassword *
The rest is about to allow pptp on the firewall (I'm assuming that you use the default Frugalware configuration: INPUT is on DROP by default, but FORWARD is allowed, OUTPUT too.)
Add the following 2 lines to the filter section of /etc/sysconfig/firewall:
-A INPUT -p gre -j ACCEPT -A INPUT -p tcp -m tcp --dport 1723 -j ACCEPT
If you want to allow a client to access Internet via this pptp server, add the following line to the nat section of the same file (change ethX to the correct network interface):
-A POSTROUTING -o ethX -j MASQUERADE
Then check if you have PPP support in the kernel enabled:
# lsmod | grep ppp_generic
If there is no output, enable it:
# modprobe ppp_generic # echo "ppp_generic" >> /etc/sysconfig/modules
Now we're ready to start:
# pptpd -f -o /etc/ppp/options.pptpd
If no error messages are reported, omit the -f option so it will go background.
Later you can put this to your /etc/rc.d/rc.local. Debug messages will appear in /var/log/messages if you're interested in them.
Client side
Install the necessary "pptp" package:
# pacman-g2 -S pptp
Most howto suggets the pptpconfig (http://pptpclient.sourceforge.net/) tool, it's written in PHP and uses GTK+2. You don't want to use graphical tools locally (and install XOrg) for administrating your machine, do you?
We can do it by hand, not too complicated.
You can name every tunnel you create, I'll use here the "mytunnel" name.
Fire up your favorite editor and create the /etc/ppp/peers/mytunnel file with the following contents:
$ grep -v '^\(#\|$\)' /etc/ppp/peers/mytunnel name mylogin remotename PPTP file /etc/ppp/options.pptp pty "pptp IP_OF_THE_SERVER --nolaunchpppd " require-mppe
Your /etc/ppp/chap-secrets should contain the following line:
mylogin PPTP secret *
We're ready to start the client:
# pppd pty 'pptp server --nolaunchpppd' call mytunnel debug dump logfd 2 nodetach
A lot of debug messages will be printed, check on an other console if you got a new pppx interface or not:
# ifconfig ppp0 ppp0 Link encap:Point-to-Point Protocol inet addr:10.0.0.89 P-t-P:10.0.0.88 Mask:255.255.255.255 UP POINTOPOINT RUNNING NOARP MULTICAST MTU:996 Metric:1 RX packets:7 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:7 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:3 RX bytes:70 (70.0 b) TX bytes:76 (76.0 b)
If it seems to be ok, you no longer need the debug messages and pppd can go backround:
# pppd pty 'pptp server --nolaunchpppd' call mytunnel
That was all. Not so simple but anyone can do it :-)
http://czeh.hu/linuxdoc/vpn-pptp.html - VPN connection using PPTP and Linux by Istvan Czeh (Hungarian)
http://webb.gotdns.com:2080/kernel-mppe/pptp-command.html - pptp-command HOWTO
17.40. qemu
17.40.1. QuickStart
If you are completely new to
qemu, you may find the big list of switches a
bit confusing. Most users want to install an operating system from a cdrom
image to a virtual harddisk. Here is what you need:
$ qemu-img create foo.img 8G
$ wget http://server.com/bar.iso
$ qemu -hda foo.img -cdrom bar.iso
17.40.2. Guest-agent
The guest agent service is started automatically, as long as the
qemu-guest subpackage is installed. See
here for setup
17.40.3. Tricks
It worth to read the full documentation at
/usr/share/doc/qemu-*/qemu-doc.html, it really worth to do so.
To demonstrate how powerful
qemu is, here are a few cheap tricks:
If you want to be able to ssh to the machine, you can use port redirection. For
example using the
-redir tcp:1022::22 option,
qemu:22 will be available at
|This requires
root privileges.
You can create a unix socket to control your virtual machine. For example if you are not able to ssh to the machine, you can still properly shut it down:
Use the
-monitor unix:/tmp/qemu,server,nowait option, then send the
ctrl-alt-delete string to the socket, for example using python:
python -c "import socket; sock = socket.socket(socket.AF_UNIX, socket.SOCK_STREAM); \
sock.connect('/tmp/qemu'); \
sock.send('sendkey ctrl-alt-delete\n')"
Finally a trick about vnc: using for example the
-vnc 0 option, it's possible
to reach qemu's display via vnc. This is quite handy if you run qemu on a
server (for example in screen), then you can freely attach to and detach from
it whenever you want to do so.
Really, read the full documentation! :)
17.41. quota-tools
To really activate quotas, you'll need to add
usrquota to the appropriate
partitions as listed in
/etc/fstab. Here's an example:
/dev/hda2 /home ext2 defaults,usrquota 1 1
When you want quota support for a given partition, some special files have to be created boot-time. This is not done by default. To do so, you need to
# touch /var/lib/quota/new
then, reboot to create those files.
To edit user quotas, use
edquota. See
man edquota.
17.42. screen
17.42.1. Keeping your screen running across reboots
You may want to restart your screen session automatically after a reboot. This is the case, for example, when we seed the Frugalware ISOs using a torrent client. Here is what you need:
Set up your
~/.screenrcso that it'll start your application when screen starts up:
screen -t seed 0 /bin/sh -c 'cd $HOME/frugalware-torrents; rtorrent'
crontab -eand append the following line to your crontab:
@reboot screen -d -m
You're ready!
17.42.2. Using multiuser screen
For that to work screen need be suid ( not default in Frugalware ).
Run the following from any console :
--- sudo chmod u+s /usr/bin/screen ---
17.43. squirrelmail-check_quota
You have to install this plugin with squirrelmail's own
./configure tool.
17.44. stunnel
You need some additional configuration before stunnel will be functional:
Adjust the configuration file:
# cp /etc/stunnel/stunnel.conf-sample /etc/stunnel/stunnel.conf
# vi /etc/stunnel/stunnel.conf
|If something goes wrong, try setting
sslVersion to
Generate your certificate:
# openssl req -new -x509 -days 365 -nodes -config /etc/stunnel/stunnel.cnf -out \
/etc/stunnel/mail.pem -keyout /etc/stunnel/mail.pem
Hide the certificate from users:
# chmod 600 /etc/stunnel/mail.pem
Now you can enable and start the service:
# systemctl enable stunnel.service
# systemctl start stunnel.service
17.45. syslinux
All the configurable defaults in SYSLINUX can be changed by putting a file called syslinux.cfg.
SYSLINUX searches for the SYSLINUX.CFG file in the following order:
/boot/syslinux/syslinux.cfg /syslinux/syslinux.cfg /syslinux.cfg
Here is a simple example syslinux.cfg file, with one entry to boot a Linux kernel:
DEFAULT linux LABEL linux SAY Now booting the kernel from SYSLINUX… KERNEL vmlinuz.img APPEND ro root=/dev/sda1
see http://syslinux.zytor.com/wiki/index.php/SYSLINUX for the complete documentation.
17.46. uget
If you want to use aria2-plugin, first install aria2 package: pacman-g2 -S aria2 == util-linux
17.46.1. Using
tmpfs for
Frugalware does not use
tmpfs for
/tmp by default. However on servers this
can cause problems: if you do not reboot for months, then cleaning
/tmp can
take some time. Using
tmpfs can solve your problem: it's a ramdisk so its
content not preserved during a reboot. All you need is to add the following
line to your
tmpfs /tmp tmpfs defaults 0 0
|You need
util-linux >= 2.12-31 for this, otherwise X may not start.
17.47. vim
If you want to enable spell check support, you need to:
install the spell files for your language:
# pacman-g2 -S vim-spell-xx
xx is code of the requested language.
enable the spell check support for your language (type in
:setlocal spell spelllang=xx_yy
Some languages need correctly set encoding. If you get a message like:
Warning: Cannot find word list "hu.latin1.spl" or "hu.ascii.spl"
then you need to set your encoding as well:
:set encoding=latin2
The incorrect words are coloured red by default. You can reach a list of
suggested words by pressing
z= when the cursor is at the given word.
If you want to disable the spell check support, type:
:setlocal nospell
It may be handy to have map function keys in
~/.vimrc to enable / disable the
spell check support:
set encoding=latin2
map <F5> <Esc>:setlocal spell spelllang=en_gb<CR>
map <F6> <Esc>:setlocal spell spelllang=hu<CR>
map <F7> <Esc>:setlocal nospell<CR>
|The language code is sometimes in an
xx and sometimes is in an
form. This is something you need to figure out for your language.
See the upstream documentation for more info about spell check support:
:help spell
17.48. x11vnc
x11vnc without a password is not recommended. To create one, type:
vncpasswd ~/.vnc/passwd
Then you can start the VNC server using
x11vnc -display :0 -rfbauth ~/.vnc/passwd -forever
if are logged in on
17.49. xcache
17.49.1. Installing As PHP Extension?
Check /etc/php.ini
# cat /usr/share/doc/xcache-$pkgver/xcache.ini >> /etc/php.ini
Modify php.ini for your needs:
# $EDITOR /etc/php.ini
Restart php
|Use >> with cat, not simply >
Please take a look on xcache wiki.
18. Mailing List Rules
18.1. Introduction
The purpose of this document is to define rules that help the communication on the mailing lists of Frugalware Linux.
18.2. Mailing Lists
frugalware-announce for general announcements (low traffic)
frugalware-security for Frugalware Security Advisories
frugalware-bugs for newly opened tasks in the Bug Tracking System (This may be extended in future, currently you must use the web interface to comment a task.)
frugalware-devel for general development questions. Every developer is supposed to read this list. It has a moderate traffic. (Usually only a few mails / day.)
frugalware-git for Git commits. This is a high traffic list. Every developer is supposed to subscribe to this list, but feel free to set Mail delivery to Disabled if you don't want to receive mails. (This is required as only subscribed users can post to prevent spam.)
frugalware-darcs for Darcs patches. No longer used, but we keep this list as the archive is useful sometimes.
frugalware-forums is a bidirectional gateway between the users of the Frugalware Forums (this forum) and people who read the mailing lists only. The primary benefit is that not all developers read the Forums, but mailing lists.
frugalware-users is for general user questions. It seems the Forums are very popular, but we still provide a mailing list for user questions.
frugalware-users-hu is for Hungarian user questions.
If not mentioned, then the language of the lists are English. Please use the appropriate language. If you know of other non-English mailing lists, please tell us, then we can include them here.
You can subscribe to our mailing lists here. Also you can unsubscribe or edit your options there.
18.3. Frugalware developers
Developers are supposed to read the
-devel and
-users mailing lists, and
supposed to be subscribed to the
-git list.
18.4. Off-list discussion
We don't set a
Reply-to: header on our mailing lists. This is intentional. If
you don't understand why this is a good decision, first please read
this document.
In practice if this is a new situation for you, then use your mail client's list-reply function, as the reply function will send the mail off-list which is not something you want in most cases.
Also please do not use the group-reply function if possible. Users must subscribe before they post, so you can be sure they are in the mailing list.
(This is different to some other projects' rules. Some projects require you to use group-reply all the time, please do not do so on our lists.)
18.5. Top posting and HTML messages
Please do not top post on our lists. Also please try to avoid HTML messages, many developers use a console mail client to read mails and reading such messages is always problematic.
18.6. Archives
We have our own archive of our mailing lists here. Gmane also provides searchable archives.
19. IRC Rules
19.1. Introduction
This document describes the rules to be followed by everyone who joins the users' and/or developers' IRC channels of Frugalware Linux.
19.2. Welcome
You have joined us on IRC, to get help from or to give help to other Frugalware users. We're sure you have made a good decision :) This document details a few basic rules that should be followed on IRC. The rules are documented here so that they're available to everyone.
19.3. IRC channels
#frugalware (Main, English-language only)
#frugalware.es (Spanish-language only)
#frugalware.fr (French-language only)
#frugalware.hu (Hungarian-language only)
#frugalware.it (Italian-language only)
Please use only the language appropriate to the channel. If you don't do so, you'll be asked to change channels. If you know of other non-English channels, please tell us.
#frugalware.dev (Frugalware development discussion. Only Frugalware developers can speak on this channel but everyone can see what's being discussed).
19.4. Frugalware developers
If you're a Frugalware developer, please also join one or more of the user channels. Since users don't have the right to speak on the #frugalware.dev channel, your presence on a user channel is the only way they can chat with you. Keep in mind that today's Frugalware users may be tomorrow's Frugalware developers.
19.5. Off-topic discussion
19.5.1. Other Linux distributions' features
You may discuss other distributions' features but don't expect everyone to be familiar with them. For example the following question is impossible to answer for someone who hasn't used Gentoo:
How can i set up my network so that it works as it does under Gentoo?
Instead, describe what it is that you're trying to achieve, for example:
Is it possible to use network profiles so that I can change all my settings
with one command when I get home from my workplace?
19.5.2. Non-Frugalware discussion
Talking about non-Frugalware topics (or even non-Linux) is okay, as long as this doesn't prevent others from talking about Frugalware. We are a community, so you're welcome to share your ideas, but don't make it impossible for others to get help.
19.6. Asking questions
19.6.1. I'm new to Frugalware
Welcome! You've either installed or are wanting to install Frugalware and so have some general questions. Before asking them in the IRC channel, please read the about page.
19.6.2. First read the Frugalware documentation
Before asking a question, first read the Frugalware documentation to be sure that the answer is not already there. Those who wrote the documentation have spent quite an amount of time and effort. If your question is answered in the documentation you'll be told to read it and provided a link. So please - read the documentation and don't be lazy.
19.6.3. Go ahead and ask
Don't first ask if you can ask a question, just go ahead and ask. The worst that can happen is that you don't get an answer.
19.7. Paste
If you have a few lines of an error message or something similar to show to others in the channel, don't paste it into the channel. This is because (1) IRC is slow and (2) it breaks the flow of other peoples' conversations. Instead, please use our Pastebin, which is available here.
19.8. Is mxw_ a bot?
Yes, it is. It informs users about new binary packages, manages rights on the channel and so on. If you want a new feature to be implemented then feel free to request it at the Frugalware Bug Tracker System (BTS) which is available here.
19.9. Bouncers, leaving your client online when you're away
That's not a problem, but please keep in mind the following: if you are away then you should be able to read back the lines when you were highlighted. If this is not possible then it's better to quit from the channels, since we think that we're talking to you while we're talking with /dev/null. Also if you're online and you have been highlighted and asked, please try to answer. If you have no time, then a simple
Alex: I don't have time ATM to answer, sorry.
is enough. So that he won't wait for your answer.
19.10. Private messaging
Please do not /msg users unless you first asked for permission to do so. This is a support channel: you ask in the channel and whoever has the time/knowledge to answer, he/she will. That the fastest way, believe us.
You should also know that some of us (voroskoi, vmiklos, maybe others too) set up their clients to ignore msgs on freenode, so you talk to /dev/null when you /msg to us.
19.11. Logging
All Frugalware channels are logged and public. The logs are linked from the home page, and the main goal is to allow search engines to index them. If you don't like this then your only choice is to not join ;-)
19.12. Verbose away messages, away nicks
Please avoid them, doing so makes the signal-to-noise ratio higher. See the Away messages suck article for further reasons.
20. Checking if Frugalware tarballs are from a trusted source
20.1. How to verify
Import our public keyring with the following command:
$ gpg --recv-keys 20F55619
Verify the tarball. Here is an example:
$ gpg --verify pacman-tools-0.7.2.tar.gz.asc pacman-tools-0.7.2.tar.gz
gpg: Signature made Sun 14 May 2006 02:35:34 AM CEST using DSA key ID 20F55619
gpg: Good signature from "Frugalware Linux Archives Verification Key \
20.2. The meaning of this signature
This signature does not guarantee that the Frugalware Linux Archives master site itself has not been compromised. However, if we suffer an intrusion we will revoke the key and post information on the home page as quickly as possible.
21. Creating new packages
21.1. Introduction
Frugalware consists of thousands of packages. Each file in the distribution belongs to a package and you can easily query to which package a file belongs. For example, if you want to know which package contains /etc/frugalware-release, you should use:
$ pacman-g2 -Qo /etc/frugalware-release
/etc/frugalware-release is owned by frugalware 0.6rc1-1
If you browse the FST (Frugalware Source Tree), you can see, that in the source directory there are category and category-extra dirs. The dirs without -extra tag contains the basic packages of the given category and the dependencies of the basic packages. So a package in these directories can not depend on a package in extra directories. The same is true for console/graphical applications: if your application/library is graphical, then use xapps/xlib, if not then use apps/lib. For each task there is a default package. For example postfix is our default MTA, so exim, sendmail, etc must be in some extra dir.
The repo has a source and a binary directory. The frugalware repo's directories are source/ and frugalware-$arch/. The binary packages are in the binary directory of the repo. The sources of packages are a little bit more complex. Each package has a category, and each category and package has its own directory in the source dir.
Let's see an example. You are searching for the cabextract package. The binary package is named frugalware-<arch>/cabextract-<version>-<release>-<arch>.fpm and its source is placed in the source/apps/cabextract dir.
In the package's own dir, we store everything required to compile the package. You may say we should store only the patches and so, but in our opinion, it's very annoying when you want to recompile a package and the original server is slow or even unreachable, due to some other reasons. Also it may be illegal that we would provide only binary packages without storing the source (since then it may be possible that we are not able to send the source to you even if you ask us by mail).
Besides, there is a FrugalBuild file in each package's source directory. This is a simple bash shell script, that will be included by makepkg. So in the FrugalBuild script you can use everything that can be used in a shell script.
|During the package database generation we source all the FrugalBuilds, so it must be a very short time to do so for each FrugalBuild. Because of this, you should not use something like:
sha1sums=(`lynx -dump http://foo.com/bar.sha1`)
but you should use:
# http://foo.com/bar.sha1
This way gensync will be fast even if reaching foo.com takes a lot of time.
Also using the
-u option an offline build is possible.
Briefly, packaging means collecting the sources, adding additional files (for example init scripts or config files) and writing the FrugalBuild script.
21.2. Recompiling packages
Before creating a new package, first we will recompile an existing package in this howto. It's very simple. In our example we will recompile the mplayer package.
First, you have to download the current FST.
Getting the FST as root
This is the most simple, you only have to issue:
# repoman upd
Getting the FST as a simple user
If you want to do it as a regular user, create the ~/.repoman.conf file and edit it, change the fst_root dir in it (by default, it would download the files to /var/fst, and it is not writable as a user, of course).
The ~/.repoman.conf file should look like:
Thought fst_root can point to any directory writeable by the user.
And finally to get the FST, issue:
$ repoman upd
Before building the chroot environment, you should make sure about that the
fst user exists on your system. Check your /etc/passwd file. If not, then
please check your /etc/passwd.pacnew file, that contains the relevant entry,
just copy that line to /etc/passwd.
Now that you have the fst user, continue with
$ cd $fst_root/source/xapps/mplayer
$ sudo makepkg [<options>]
|If you are using stable, you probably want to use the
-t stable option!
First we enter the directory of mplayer then (like make and Makefile) we run makepkg that will build the package according to the parameters described in FrugalBuild. We once had to use the -R option to build the package in a chroot-ed environment. Since 0.5, building in chroot is the default method, you have to use -H if you want to build on the host system. Chroot requires root privileges. To allow a group (for example the devels group) to use sudo makepkg, start visudo as root, and add the following line:
%devels ALL=NOPASSWD:/usr/bin/makepkg
The chroot will be placed by default in /var/chroot. Only one package can be built in a chroot at a time, so maybe you'll want to specify a separate chroot for each user. In order to do this, set the $CHROOTDIR variable in your /etc/makepkg.conf from:
export CHROOTDIR="/var/chroot"
export CHROOTDIR="/var/chroot.`echo $HOME|sed \'s|.\*/\(.*\)$|\1|'"`
This way the one parallel build / one system limit is increased to one parallel build / one user.
(See man makepkg for more info about the benefits of building in a chroot).
21.3. Use variables
You can alter the result of the build process using environment variables
without touching the FrugalBuild itself. The
git package is a good example.
$ sudo makepkg [<options>] USE_DEVEL=y
for that package results in a build of git's development version. Here is what you need if you want so for your package:
# set the variable to false by default
# these commands will be evaluated only in case USE_DEVEL is set to true
if Fuse $USE_DEVEL; then
Finclude scm
In the next section we will see an example for a simple FrugalBuild script.
21.4. A simple example
Let's see a simple example, the FrugalBuild script of the cabextract package.
# Compiling Time: 0.06 SBU
# Maintainer: James Buren <firstname.lastname@example.com>
pkgdesc="a program to extract Microsoft Cabinet files"
archs=('i686' 'x86_64')
up2date="lynx -dump http://www.kyz.uklinux.net/cabextract.php |grep 'cabextract \
source code'|tr -s ' '|cut -d ' ' -f 6"
# optimization OK
And here comes the description for each line:
# Compiling Time: 0.06 SBU
You should write here how much time it took to build the package. Of course, it depends on your hardware, so we use SBUs instead of minutes as a unit.
SBU is the Static Binutils Unit, which means the time repoman merge binutils takes on your machine. By default makepkg will print out how many seconds the build took. After you built binutils, you should update your /etc/makepkg.conf:
The line above means compiling binutils on your machine took 257 seconds. From this point, makepkg will print out SBUs instead of seconds after successful builds, and this SBU value will be equal on anyone's machine.
# Maintainer: James Buren <email@example.com>
If you are the maintainer of the package, write your name or nick and e-mail address here. If you probably you won't maintain the package, write Contributor instead of Maintainer, and then the Maintainer will add his/her line later. A package may have only one contributor: the first person who wrote FrugalBuild for it. The maintainer is the current maintainer. The other names should not be included in the FrugalBuild, anyone can use the version control features to look for them.
This will be the name of the package. It's allowed to include numbers, hyphens (-), etc., and should be lowercase.
The package's version. Hyphens are not allowed, so a 1.0-6111 will be usually converted to 1.0_6111.
Release number marks Frugalware-specific changes. If you recompile a package, you should increase this number. If you upgrade to a newer version, don't forget to reset this number back to 1. If you design a new package, set this to 1.
pkgdesc="a program to extract Microsoft Cabinet files"
A short one-line description for the package. Usually taken from the project's homepage or manpage.
The website of the project.
List of dependencies of the package, defined in a bash array. Usually you should compile a package at least two times: first with depends=(), then you should run chkdep -p foo.fpm that will suggest the dependencies, but handle that information with caution! Reading the README, INSTALL and configure.ac files is also a good idea to find out dependencies.
It is needed to know where, in which category the package belongs. The most important thing: don't put your package in apps, base, devel, lib, multimedia or network, if it depends on X (or on a pkg depending on X, of course). Packages in the extra repository get the -extra suffix to the group name.
You should use groups for creating metapackages. The method is the following: put each package to an existing group (group without a hyphen or with the -extra suffix), then add the packages to a new group, something like foo-suite or whatever your want, provided that the name is not an existing group.
groups=(\'lib-extra\' \'foo-suite\')
archs=(\'i686\' \'x86_64\')
This array defines for which architectures the given package is available. If it's not available, it means that gensync will skip it when generating package databases. If you are not able to provide a binary package for a given arch, don't include that in archs()! For example, no matter if the package could be compiled in x86_64, if you haven't compiled it yourself, don't include it.
up2date="lynx -dump http://www.kyz.uklinux.net/cabextract.php |grep 'cabextract \
source code' |sed 's/.*-\(.*\).t.*/\1/'"
A short command that will give us the latest stable version of the package.
This helps maintainers to keep the FST up to date. Usually this string
consists of three parts: a lynx -dump someurl, a grep foo, and a sed
command. We use the http protocol if possible, but sometimes we have to
use ftp. In that case instead of
lynx -dump you should use
wget -O - -q. Of course, you could use wget all the time,
but lynx is simpler. The sed command could be replaced with the
combination of tr and cut if you prefer them instead of sed.
The example used above would be the following with cut and tr:
up2date="lynx -dump http://www.kyz.uklinux.net/cabextract.php |grep \
'cabextractsource code'|tr -s ' '|cut -d ' ' -f 6"
Here you define the sources of the package in a bash array. You can use simple filenames for patches, or additional files when you place them in the same directory as the FrugalBuild script. You can use URLs if you want makepkg to download them automatically. It's important to place all sources in the package's directory including the source files that you can download from a site. Also when dowloading from sourceforge, please use Finclude sourceforge! If you use various random patches from unknown sources, don't expect that somebody else will port those patches to a newer version. You will have to do the work yourself. You have been warned! Actually try to avoid patches unless they are really necessary (eg: secfix, bugfix).
A few words about the size of the sources. If you use an URL then the size is
almost unlimited, but if the source is not an url then the source will be added
to the FST when the package is accepted. We don't allow files bigger than 100KB
in FST. To solve this problem, the sources for a given package are placed
in the /pub/other/sources/pkgname dir for each package. If the source is not
compressed, we use gzip or bzip2 to compress it first. After this you can use a
http://ftp.frugalware.org/pub/other/sources/pkgname/foo-styled URL for those
big sources.
Another bash array to prevent compiling from the wrong source. Of course this is useless if you just run sha1sum foo.tar.gz after download. Try fetching original sha1sums from the projects website, if possible. It's a good idea to leave a comment above this line about where to find these sha1sums.
As you can see there in no build() function in this FB. It's because we wrote some F* functions to make our work easier. It's something similar you can see in Gentoo for example. These functions can be found in source/include/util.sh file inside the FST. An empty build actually means:
build() {
Fmake "$@"
if echo ${source[@]}|grep -q README.Frugalware; then
Fdoc README.Frugalware
So Fpatchall will apply all the patches in source() array, then Fmake calls the configure script and make command, then Fmakeinstall acts like make install, finally if a README.Frugalware file is given it will also add that to the package. For details see the utils.sh file, it's well documented.
|You don't have to use these F* commands, but we highly recommend it. Also if you use simple commands do not forget to add || return 1 after each command, so the build will stop on error!
# optimization OK
This line will be added automatically to the end of the FrugalBuild if the build() function used your $CFLAGS or $CXXFLAGS. This is handy if you want to cross-compile on a faster machine for a slower architecture. If the package doesn't use our $CFLAGS we can't cross-compile it, so please try to avoid creating "unoptimized" packages. If the package doesn't contain any architecture-dependent file, then you can add this line manually as makepkg will not detect this.
21.5. Full reference
Now here is a full list of directives available.
First, let's start with the install directive. Here you can refer to an install file (usually $pkgname.install) to use. If there is a $pkgname.install in the FrugalBuild's directory, it will be used automatically. In the install file, you can define actions to be executed before/after installing/upgrading/removing the package. A skeleton of this file can be found under /docs/skel in FST.
Of course, you probably will not need all of these functions, just remove what you don't need. If you want to do exactly the same after upgrading as after installing, feel free to use post_install $1 in the post_upgrade() function.
Save this file as $pkgname.install, thus makepkg will automatically use it. You should not specify the install script in the source array as it is not used in build().
The pkgname, pkgver, pkgrel, url, source and sha1sums directives were discussed in the previous section.
The backup array is used to make some files in the package as config files. If possible, we don't modify config files during an upgrade. Example:
Note that the leading slash is missing!
For more information about this, see the handling config files section in the pacman-g2 manpage
The depends array has been discussed already, except I haven't mentioned before that the elements may include version information, for example:
Here you can use <>, ⇐, >= or = operators.
The makedepends array defines packages required only in build time. For example if the source is in SRPM format, probably alien is a build-time requirement.
The rodepends array defines packages required only in runtime. It must be used in any case when putting the given package in the depends() array would cause circular dependency.
In the conflicts array, you can define a list of packages that shouldn't be installed if you want to install this package. Let's see an another example:
It is necessary as the two packages are almost the same, but the binaries
differ. In this case the mutt package must also contain this line:
conflicts=(\'mutt-devel\'). Of course, if two or more packages conflict eachother, only one of them can be
placed in a non-extra group.
The provides array is used to create virtual dependencies. It means both postfix and sendmail provides mta, so we can do:
The user has a choice between postfix and sendmail.
The last one in this list is the replaces directive. The module-init-tools package is a good example:
As you can see, we often make such new packages which also conflict with each other. Using the replaces directive when users use pacman-g2 -Su next time, if modutils is installed (probably :)), they will be asked to remove modutils and install module-init-tools.
This directive is optional. At the moment, you may add such a field, but copy the LICENSE field from the source root to the packages's documentation dir, so this isn't really necessary.
21.6. Subpackages
Since 0.5 makepkg can also create subpackages. It is very useful when your package has graphical parts based on qt for example. It's a pain for gnome users as they want the package, but they do not want the qt part. So you create a subpackage for qt part and both side is happy. Let's see an example:
# Compiling Time: 1.43 SBU
# Maintainer: crazy <firstname.lastname@example.com>
pkgdesc="DjVu is a web-centric format for distributing documents and images."
depends=('libtiff' 'libjpeg')
makedepends=('kdelibs' 'gnome-mime-data' 'gnome-icon-theme' 'htop')
archs=('i686' 'x86_64')
Finclude sourceforge
source=(${source[@]} head_-n1.patch no-OPTS-FLAGS-thx.patch)
subdescs=('DjVu viewer for qt and mozilla plugins.')
subdepends=('libxi libgl qt libxmu')
subarchs=('i686 x86_64')
export CFLAGS="$CFLAGS"
export CXXFLAGS="$CXXFLAGS"
Fconf \
--enable-threads \
--disable-desktopfiles \
--enable-xmltools \
make depend || Fdie
make || Fdie
Fln /usr/lib/netscape/plugins/nsdejavu.so \
Fln djview3.1.gz usr/share/man/man1/djview.1
Fsplit djview usr/bin/djview
Fsplit djview usr/bin/djview3
Fsplit djview usr/lib/mozilla
Fsplit djview usr/lib/netscape
for i in . ja; do
[[ $i == . ]] && Fsplit djview usr/share/man/$i/man1/djview.1
Fsplit djview usr/share/man/$i/man1/djview3.1
Fsplit djview usr/share/man/$i/man1/nsdejavu.1
Fsplit djview usr/share/djvu/djview3
Here you can see the djvulibre FrugalBuild. Note subpkgs, subdescs, subdepends,
subgroups and subarchs. These 5 value is lethal for a subpackage. There are
other subpackage variables too of course. See
man FrugalBuild for details.
Also note that bash does not support two-dimensional arrays, so when defining
the array of arrays, then quotes are the major separators and spaces are the minor ones.
Defining the subpackage is only the first part of creating a subpackage. You have to tell makepkg which files you want to put in the subpackage. We use Fsplit command for this. First parameter is the subpackage name, second is the file you want to move. Please never use a trailing slash when defining file patterns, especially if you use wildcards in it!
If you need more example just take a look on avahi FrugalBuild in network group.
|Use subpackages when they are necessary, but do not start making foo-devel, foo-common, foo-not-so-common, foo-quite-common-but-not-that-common packages :) Making too much subpackage makes maintaining too hard and simplicity is the frugal way.
21.7. Compiling the package
That's fairly simple. In the package directory you should do exactly the same as described in the Recompiling packages section. If you want to contribute this package to the Frugalware project, then go to BTS, open a feature request and upload each non-downloadable file (ie. FrugalBuild, install scriptlet, patches) as an attachement. Please do not forget to check your FrugalBuild with fblint command before uploading it. Fblint is available in pacman-tools package.
Happy packaging!
21.8. Kernel modules
A few words about kernel modules. They're special as even if you installed the correct version of the kernel (and kernel-source) package, sometimes the modules are compiled for the running kernel, so you have to check if compiling against other kernel version than the running one works or not. You can use the modinfo command for this. If crosscompiling does not work always add Fcheckkernel to the build(). So here is the list of conditions a kernel module package have to satisfy:
1) Should depend on kernel=version, where version is the version of the kernel defined in $fst_root/source/include/kernel-module.sh. (Always use up-to-date FST!)
2) Should Finclude the kernel-module scheme.
3) If you want to use a custom install script (saying running just depmod -a after the install/upgrade is not enough for you) then the install script should run depmod -a. Otherwise the scheme will provide so a scriptlet which does so.
4) build() should call Fcheckkernel to ensure the module will be compiled for the right kernel version or it should be commented if you have checked the compiling for other kernel version. It is good for out build servers as they may not run the kernel provided by the given package tree. (They can't run -stable and -current kernels at the same time :) ).
5) Kernel modules may be installed for the not-currently-running kernel. To ensure they are registered properly, you need to use the Fbuild_kernelmod_scriptlet function. It generates the proper install scriptlet for you.
man kernel-module.sh for more info.
21.9. Repoman
Repoman is simple tool to download all packages' buildscript and compile programs from source.
The most commonly used repoman commands are the following:
repoman merge package
or simply
repoman m package
builds a package from source and installs it. You can configure the build options in the makepkg_opts directive of /etc/repoman.conf.
By default repoman will install the missing dependencies with pacman, clean up the leftover work files, install the package, and write the resulting package to the current working directory.
repoman update
or simply
repoman upd
updates FST in /var/fst (or the directory set in ~/.repoman.conf). First time repoman will download it (it may take some time!).
22. GNU Free Documentation License
Version 1.2, November 2002
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