Frugalware 1.0 (Anacreon) Documentation

Before you start to read this document, you should know some important things about how to read it.

First there are some part of this document that you should really read, to understand how frugalware is working and how to administrate it.

Along this document, there are boxed text that shows you a console log. These logs are important and requires quite some attentions since most off the time you are expected to run them and get the same output.

This is how a console log look. Lets details it so you understand what means.

The echo foo bar part is what you should type and it’s the command. The following line foo bar is the ouput of the previous command.

You may wonder what differenciate 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 priviledges required to run the command.

The aim of creating Frugalware was to help you doing 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 VMiklos, the founder of the project. You can reach the full list of articles that have been posted about Frugalware here.

Frugalware is a general purpose linux distribution, designed for intermediate users (who are not afraid of text mode).

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 originally init scripts written by Patrick J. Volkerding, creator of the Slackware Linux distribution. We GPL our additions, 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 pacman-g2 -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 us 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 is not a 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 repoman upd command, which is available in the pacman-tools package. Then start to play with the FrugalBuild scripts, for a skeleton, refer to the /docs/skel 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 to a previously non-existent package. They write documentation, fix bugs, provides supports, or anything else in connection with the Frugalware community. If you only want to help us, but you don’t want to hack, 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 it haven’t translated yet.”

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) and x86_64 (k8, aka. amd64) platforms.”

Depending on your needs, there are different installers with different characteristics. You can choose which fits you the best.

Which CDs do you need? If you install a server without X, only the first. If you need a graphical system, then you’ll need the second CD as well.

On PPC, to boot from an external CD drive, you will need to use the Open Firmware prompt, since Open Firmware does not search external optical devices by default. To get to the prompt, hold down Command+Option+o+f all together while booting.

You will need to work out where the optical device appears in the device tree. Type dev / ls and devalias at the Open Firmware prompt to get a list of all known devices and device aliases.

Example, in case the path is /pci@f2000000/usb@1b/disk@1:

If you don’t have any Internet connection but you want language packs and other optional packages, you’ll need two DVDs.

Pros: a full offline installation is possible.

Cons: Large amount of data must be downloaded, presumably some unnecessary packages too.

This is a small ISO image, currently under 32Mb, which is able to boot up, configure the network and install the system with the selected packages, which are downloaded on-the-fly as required.

Pros: Small image size, no wasted bandwidth with downloading outdated or unnecessary packages.

Cons: No offline installation possible, high bandwidth or hours of patience required for a full installation.

An alternate way of doing this is to just copy the contents of the ISO image to your hard drive and use your existing boot manager to boot it.

Typically you can add a new entry to your existing GRUB installation on i686 or x86_64 (in this case you just have to copy the commands from the menu.lst file from the image) or you can boot yaboot from Open Firmware on PPC. (See below on how to invoke Open Firmware.) Once you have the Open Firmware prompt, for example in case the boot directory is copied to the root directory of the 5th partition of your hard disk:

Pros: No USB stick or (re)writeable CD needed.

Cons: Possible only in case you have some kind of bootloader available.

This is a filesystem image, similar to the network install ISO image.

The following command will install the image to the USB stick on any recent Linux system:

You can use a similar tool (like this) on Windows systems as well:

On PPC, create a partition of type "Apple_Bootstrap" on your USB stick using mac-fdisk and extract the image there. For example:

Pros: No need to burn any CD.

Cons: You have to be able to boot from USB.

On PPC, to boot from a USB stick, you will need to use the Open Firmware prompt, since Open Firmware does not search USB storage devices by default. To get to the prompt, hold down Command+Option+o+f all together while booting.

You will need to work out where the USB storage device appears in the device tree. Type dev / ls and devalias at the Open Firmware prompt to get a list of all known devices and device aliases.

Example, in case the path is /pci@f2000000/usb@1b:

This is a floppy image, for a very special case:

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

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.

You can get a list of installed packages in the chroot with issuing the pacman-g2 -Q command.

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

which installs the core and base pkgs into it. But beware:

so you have to copy or forge them by hand.

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 respectively $version$, $arch$ and $media$ to get the wanted iso image.

Via FTP:

Via HTTP:

Via rsync:

More info and the full list of mirrors can be found at our download page.

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.

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.

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.

After the installation of grub, the installer will configure your kernel modules. This means that an information dialog appears, but nothing more.

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, and gksu or kdesu under X.

After this, setup will configure your network settings. Setup simply runs the netconfig utility, which is described in the Networking section.

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.

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.

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).

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 the pacman-g2 command. Here are some basic actions with pacman-g2:

Actions usually used with remote installation from an FTP server:

Updates the package database. Before searching for packages or installing them from an FTP server, you will have to use this command.

Upgrades all packages that are currently installed but a newer version of the package is available on the FTP server.

The combination of the above two, that is the command most users use daily.

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.

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.

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:

Adds (or if it’s already installed, upgrades) the zsh package, which is located in the current directory.

Removes the qt package.

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.

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.

For those who are familiar with the apt package management tool, here is a quick cross-reference.

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 /etc/sysconfig/modules file and put the module in the blacklist by editing /etc/sysconfig/blacklist. Configuring any interface on your card will be the task of the netconfig utility. Initializing your card ends here.

Configuring your network settings is done by the netconfig utility.

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.

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:

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:

If you install X, setup will run xconfig, our X configuration utility automatically. First, xconfig will detect your configuration and will create a basic configuration file. Then it will ask you to specify the screen resolution and colour depth. Finally, it will create the real configuration file, with the following extras:

After generating the config file, setup will start the X server. You must click the OK button to confirm to xconfig that the configuration was successful.

If there is built-in 3d acceleration support for your card in X, xconfig will add the necessary entries to /etc/X11/xorg.conf and X will load the module(s).

If you have an ATI or NVIDIA card, you probably need the manufacturer’s binary drivers. Obtaining the NVIDIA binary driver is fairly simple:

If you have an ATI card, installation will not be more complicated than a simple

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 (/usr/share/config/kdm/kdmrc)

AllowRootLogin=false

modify to

AllowRootLogin=true

For GDM (/etc/gdm/gdm.conf)

AllowRoot=false

modify to

AllowRoot=true

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.

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

and the

command.

Frugalware uses the Common Unix Printing System (CUPS) for handling printers and to manage printing.

Here comes a few advice depending on what manufacturer made your printer.

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.

Most likely you need one of the bjfilter packages. The following list tell you which package you should use.

Please report us if your printer does not listed or listed, but in the wrong line!

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!

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.

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.

If your vendor or printer type isn’t listed in the wizard, you have to check http://openprinting.org/printer_list.cgi wether 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:

If it’s not on the webpage 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 http://www.linux-foundation.org/en/OpenPrinting/Database/CUPSDocumentation.

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:

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

or open it in your favourite PS viewer.

If something goes wrong, check out CUPS log at /var/log/cups. There is a verbose error log and an access log, too.

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, 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.

Pendrives (also known as thumbdrives) 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 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 do not expect as fine work as in KDE, Gnome, XFCE4. See also the automounting part of the documentation.

Tyipcally, 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 ‘gphoto2`, if your model is supported. (If it’s not available on your system, a simple su -c 'pacman-g2 -S gphoto2\’ will install it onto your system.)

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 do that, not ivman. Ivman is useful for other windowing systems where is no support for such a feature.

The Linux kernel is in the kernel package. We’re trying to 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.

In Frugalware, init scripts are always called rc.something and they are located in /etc/rc.d. They are used to setup the environement and also allow to manage system services.

The services are UNIX daemons that provides various kind of service. The spectrum of their actions are very large. Synchronizing your system clock, running your webserver, running the virus scanner, all of these are services and they offer much much more.

The files that allow to manage them can be found in /etc/rc.d, but usually you will prefer to use our utility service. This tool allows you to control the running state of the services.

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. As you will see the syntax is simple, and you may get more help looking and the service manual doing:

Services can be started, restarted and stopped, so that you can control what your system has to offer.

To start a service, simply do:

To restart a service, simply do:

To stop a service, simply do:

As you can see, controlling a service execution is pretty simple.

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:

To delete a service for automatic execution on system startup, simply do:

To list the runlevels in which the service will be running, simply do:

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 the content of /etc/inittab, init will run:

If X11 is configured, /etc/rc.d/rc.4 will start one of the desktop managers, as configured in /etc/sysconfig/desktop.

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:

Before: gfxmenu (hd0,5)/boot/grub/message
After: #gfxmenu (hd0,5)/boot/grub/message

Frugalware uses splashy to display 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:

If you find our work and effort worth it, please consider donating. This is not limited to monetary contributions, every donation of a limited valuable resource (including your time, knowledge) is appreciated. Depending on your resources, there are many ways to help us.

A comprehensive and multi-language documentation is very important. With linguistic and no programming knowledge and some time, you can help us create (by asking) and maintain different translations.

In the Bug Tracking System, there are feature requests for some packages. The process of making packages is well documented, and with some GNU/Linux experience, it isn’t difficult. But it takes time, so submitting well-packaged software is a great way to help us and save our time.

Of course, any skilled help is appreciated in developing core systems, like contributing code to pacman-g2 or the setup.

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.

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 to help, you’re welcome. :)

If you have time and knowledge, monitor the forums, read the mailing list posts, hang around on IRC and try to answer the questions, solve the occured problems.

If you find bugs, you can help with submitting well-written bugreports, see the Reporting Bugs section for more info.

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.

The URL of our Bug tracking system is:

Before opening a task, use the search function, maybe there is a task for your bug/feature. In that case just add a comment about "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 outdated package make sure that it isn’t listed on this site. When your package is listed please do not report it as we know there is a new version and we will update it as soon as possible.

Write bugreports in English, please. This is the only language all developers speak.

Please include the following things, unless you know what you are doing:

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 maybe -current is not enough, please specify the snapshot date.

If you found a security bug, then use the [SEC] prefix in the task name.

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 out packages.)

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 do you think this package would be interesting for others, too

If you have a FrugalBuild for the package already, then after opening the task, upload it as an attachment. In this case, please prefix your task name with [FB], because this way it’ll 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 buildscript - 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.

Please don’t request custom kernels. We try to use as less patches as possible. See man kernel.sh as a reference on building your own packages using various patchsets. Also a tutorial is available. Really, building such a kernel usually requires a buildscript of only 5 lines!

If you get a crash from our package manager then we need a backtrace from gdb. Here are the instructions to get a backtrace:

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 important, 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.

Notebook users are usually interested in the state of their battery. To get the power button and the lid’s sensor of its closed state 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 the following steps are required to enable this functionality: Adding the following lines to /etc/sysconfig/modules to get modules loaded at system startup:

The next task is to enable the acpid service:

Then the easiest way is to reboot, or if you don’t want do do so:

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.

The major consumers of power in a notebook are the LCD (size and brightness level), 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 for 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. Only useful in situations where there is no frequent need for data on hdd like holding a presentation.

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:

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 vga=788

The new line:

kernel (hd0,2)/boot/vmlinuz ro root=/dev/hda3 quiet vga=788 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.

The following sections describe the configuration of some packages.

In order to use acoc you should start it with

for example, or you can create an alias like this:

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:

You should chown any other amavis-owned stuff you may have lying around, these are only the default ones.

You have finished if you don’t need SSL support.

This must be done as root.

Enter "foobar" twice as passphrase.

Enter "foobar" when asked for passphrase, answer the questions. Leave "challenge password" "and optional company name" empty.

Enter "foobar" when asked for passphrase.

Uncomment the marked three lines around line 1044 (look for "SSL support").

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.)

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:

Also, If you are using iptables, please uncomment this line in /etc/sysconfig/firewall:

After that do not forget to restart iptables with:

After installing this package, please run

to setup B2evolution.

Since version 2.6.24, the bcm43xx driver is deprecated, replaced by the b43 and b43legacy modules.

The module should be loaded automatically, in case it isn’t, you can load it manually:

or:

You must bring the device up with ifconfig before doing any other configuration steps.

Since the channel must be set manually, first do a scan:

Then you can set it:

Finally set your essid:

Ready!

Some tips and trick for use with barpanel:

Then, change the theme in your ~/.barpanel/config.xml configuration file.

Enjoy.

Please read the README file in the documentation directory of the package on how to fine-tune the configuration file of skyped and on how to generate the SSL certificates for it.

Cairo-Clock requires the Composite option to be enabled in your Xorg configuration. To enable it, add the following lines to /etc/X11/xorg.conf:

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 ccache from chrooted builds, then you need to add the fst user:

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:

After installing cpuspeed, make sure you edit the configuration file before starting it. The configuration file is located in /etc/cpuspeed.conf.

Set the correct CPUFreq driver name in the confiuration file by setting the DRIVER value. for eg: if you want to use the p4-clockmod driver, your cpuspeed configuration file should contain:

For a list of drivers, check this directory /lib/modules/your_kernel_version/kernel/arch/i386/kernel/cpu/cpufreq

Follow these steps to when using cryptsetup-luks:

Of course later you don’t have to use luksFormat and mke2fs:

Here we will be asked for a password which will be necessary to access /home at boot time.

You have to delay the splash screen, so that you can type your password before the splash appears:

(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.

To use your wiimote you have to load module uninput with:

To load this module at every start-up, just add uninput in /etc/sysconfig/modules file.

This mini-howto helps you to install the saslauthd server using postfix which will authenticate using users and passwords from /etc/{passwd,shadow}.

First install the necessary packages:

Enable sasl in postfix’s config by appending the following lines to /etc/postfix/main.cf:

You may want to append

as well.

Put the following lines to /usr/lib/sasl2/smtpd.conf:

Edit /etc/sysconfig/saslauthd by changing the following lines:

to

and

to

Now you can start saslauthd by

as well as enabled in by default on startup:

Issue id postfix and see if the daemon group is listed. If not, then add postfix to the daemon group:

Finally restart postfix:

Compeleted!

We test it using telnet. We need perl to generate the string for the SASL authentication:

Then use telnet:

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:

Try for example:

When you connect to a server, others will see that you’re connecting from the server, not from your own host.

First, please note that darcs comes with a very good HTML documentation, which is available under the /usr/share/doc/darcs-*/manual dir. That’s the place where everything is properly documented, not the manpage. Using darcs [subcommand] -h is usable only as a reference, too.

If you’re completely new to darcs, then start at /usr/share/doc/darcs-*/manual/node4.html.

Please also note that in order for the darcs send command to work properly, you must properly configure your mail transport agent to relay outgoing mail. For example, if you are using postfix, you need to edit /etc/postfix/main.cf, see the Using a relay host part of the postfix package documentation for more info.

If you got errors saying:

dazuko: failed to register

then you need to do:

It will work.

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:

If you are in trouble setting up your dhclient, use the following options. These are quite good defaults:

Dillo is moving to FLTK2. As of 2006-04-29 it is unstable (both unreleased and has some random erratic bugs, but upstream is working on it), and some KDE stuff has fltk dep, so not a good idea to mess with.

Dillo is now "crippled" by removing the new FLTK based download GUI, as it is only this needs FLTK2, but for the next release more FLTK2 expected.

After installing this package, please run /usr/bin/drupalsetup as root to setup Drupal

To be able to use this package as intended, you will have to:

According to this module’s documentation (available eg. at /var/www/drupal/sites/all/modules/jquery_update/README.txt), some of Drupal’s own .js files must be overwritten with the ones shipped with this module. This is done automatically when installing/upgrading this package, but upgrading the drupal package will revert those files (and Drupal will whine at the administration area). Reinstalling this package (or copy the files over by hand) should stop the whining.

To populate the DSPAM database, you need to follow several steps.

If you want to use the postgresql, sqlite3 or Berekely DB4 backends you can find instructions in the dspam documentation.

In order to use eAccelerator, you must add the following lines to your /etc/php.ini file:

Do not forget to create the cache directory as well:

To be able to use this package as intended, you will have to:

Generate Key Pair:

Remove pass parse:

Combine the Private and Public Key:

Delete Private Key:

Set permissions:

Finally update the config file:

Register an account on your ejabberd deployment. An account can be created using a jabber client like pidgin.

Add the following lines to you config:

This will promote the account created in the previous step to an account with administrator rights.

Add the following line to your /etc/sysconfig/firewall, for example after mysql:

Now you should be able to connect to ejabberd remotely. Start your favourite jabber client on a remote machine (ie. pidgin) and register another account. You should be able to talk to the admin now and vica versa.

For more info, please read the Installation and Operation Guide, which can be found at /usr/share/doc/ejabberd-*/guide.html.

If you got disconnected from servers and getting some #20004 errors, then run as pbweb AS ROOT!!!

Then try again :)

Regards

If your keyboard doesn’t work that can be because wrong virtual terminal number set in entrance config. Use the following command to set the proper value:

In this example you want to run entrance on vt7.

To test festival, try:

If hardware acceleration does not work make sure you have something similar in /etc/fstab:

If xv output doesn’t work in mplayer add the following line to /etx/X11/xorg.conf's Device section:

On the following page you can find some useful solutions for different fglrx problems: Thinkwiki fglrx.

This version comes with a system init script now. You have to run the firestarter executable from the command line (in an X driven console) first to generate the initial start-up scripts.

To add it to startup, run this:

To remove it from startup:

Once you have the .flv file you want to share, you need to symlink flowplayer.controls.swf, flowplayer.min.js and flowplayer.swf from /usr/share/flowplayer and the code sniplet from /usr/share/flowplayer/example/index.html.

This driver is under constant change, therefore no "stable" branch exists. Also, communications with the author led nowhere, that might explain some weirdness of building it, getting the latest stable version number etc. Mail

After installing this package, please run /usr/bin/fudforumsetup as root to setup FUDforum

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:

Then you have to add the fuse service to the startup list and start it manually for now:

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:

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.

Then, you can mount a remote dir with sftp access as a regular user doing:

You can also unmount it as a regular user doing:

You need to create your ~/.gammurc:

Replace /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:

It should print your IMEI number so that you’ll be able to check if gammu really found your phone or there is a problem.

You probably use gammu to make a backup of your phone.

This involves two steps:

You may find an alternative format more human-readable for SMSes:

See the manual page for more tricks!

I have heard I should never remove the gcc package. Is this still true?

“No, since we split the gcc package, the standard C++ library is a separate package, you have to install gcc only in case you really need a C compiler.”

gcjwebplugin is a Firefox plugin for running Java applets. It is now included in the libgcj sub-package, though it is not enabled by default.

GNU Classpath and libgcj’s security implementation is under active development, but it is not ready to be declared secure. Specifically, it cannot run untrusted applets safely.

When gcjwebplugin is enabled, it prompts you with a dialog before loading an applet. The dialog tells you that a certain URL would like to load an applet, and asks if you trust the applet. Be aware though that this dialog is mostly informative and doesn’t provide much protection:

CURRENTLY GCJWEBPLUGIN RUNS WITH NO SECURITY MANAGER. THIS MEANS THAT APPLETS CAN DO ANYTHING A JAVA APPLICATION THAT YOU DOWNLOAD AND RUN COULD DO. BE VERY CAREFUL WHICH APPLETS YOU RUN. DO NOT USE GCJWEBPLUGIN ON YOUR SYSTEM IF YOUR SYSTEM STORES IMPORTANT DATA. THIS DATA CAN BE DESTROYED OR STOLEN.

The same warning applies to gappletviewer, which also runs with no security manager (in fact, gcjwebplugin spawns gappletviewer to do the applet loading). When run on the command line, gappletviewer issues a warning on startup and asks you if you want to continue.

Even considering the risks involved, you may still want to try gcjwebplugin. GNU Classpath’s AWT and Swing implementations are now sufficiently mature that they’re able to run many applets deployed on the web. If you’re interested in trying gcjwebplugin, you can do so by creating a symbolic link in ~/.mozilla/plugins like so:

Type about:plugins in Firefox’s URL bar to confirm that the plugin has been loaded. To see gcjwebplugin debugging output, run:

then at the GDB prompt, type

If you want to set up a web interface for your git repositories, then:

The Mini Commander applet has been replaced by Deskbar. If you want the functionality provided by the Mini Commander applet, please install the deskbar-applet package with pacman

The most common usage of this applications is something like this:

This app does not have any webserver, SQL server nor IMAP server in its depends, which is intentional. Anyway, if you plan to use it, you should set up a webserver and an IMAP server. The SQL server is optional, but it’s the most easiest-to-use preferences container.

Additionally this app is not configured in any way: there are far too many customizable settings, so the packager cannot know how to set them for your particular needs. Installation instructions can be found in the INSTALL file.

Don’t forget to open port 8080 on your firewall!

To do this, add the following two lines to your /etc/sysconfig/firewall:

for example after MySQL’s entry.

Welcome to the README! Thanks for taking the time to find it ;-)

For an introduction to the wonderful world of HylaFAX(tm), please see http://www.hylafax.org/. Beginners should head directly to the docs:

If you have a question which you think relates only to the FPM version of HylaFAX post a bug to the Frugalware BTS:

You should also be aware of the following system modification: FaxMaster is added to /etc/postfix/aliases after installation automatically.

The default configuration files can be found under /var/spool/hylafax/config/defaults/. You can copy these files to the /var/spool/hylafax/etc/ directory and modify them there.

Enjoy!

I have included a custom shell script called icewm-menus, for use with the icewm menu file. An example menus file is also include at /usr/share/icewm/menus. It uses standard shell syntax, so you can easily use shell variables, etc, to create dynamic menus in icewm through my script and the usage of your local $HOME/.icewm/menus file. To use it, use the following syntax in your menu file: menuprog "(folder name)" (icon name) icewm-menus (menu switch to use) If setup correctly, you’ll wind up with menus generated by the output of the shell script. Have fun configuring icewm.

After installing this package, please run /usr/bin/joomlasetup as root to setup Joomla

If you want to rip a video DVD, install the transcode package as well.

If you do not know the keycodes for the keys you wish to remap the joystick events to, then please install the xev program. It will help you to identify them. Moving on, the /etc/kbstick.conf is the system level configuration file the shell script reads from if the user does not have a .kbstickrc in their home directory. Syntax is the same in both cases, and the configuration file has some comments to give you an idea of what each variable does. I have set the default up/down/left/right key mappings to what my laptop uses for them and the buttons will have to be manually defined to their proper keycodes. If you need any further help, please email the maintainer of this package.

Loading the new kernel:

Booting it:

In order to use keytouch, you must start the keytouch daemon. This can be done by executing the following command (as root):

To start it automatically everytime your system boots, just type

Now, before you can use keytouch, you need to start one more daemon (this time as user) called keytouchd. You might even want to add keytouchd to the list of startup programs in your respective Desktop Environment. For e.g.: In GNOME, point to System→Preferences→Personal and open Sessions to open the session preferences. Now you can add keytouchd to the list of startup programs.

If you want to test this package, you can use for example the server of VoipBuster.

First, you should register a user name and password with their native (Windows-only) client. After that give iax.voipbuster.com as the server and your just registered username and password.

Now you should able to dial (currently the first minute is for free).

To use knb, you need a config file like this:

where idlenick is used till keepnick is used by someone else. The bot will join to #channel on irc.server.com.

You need to register that you’re the owner for the first time. To do this, join #channel and

to give access someone to the bot.

Once keepnick is no longer used and knb switched to that nick, you can use

to change knb’s nick back to idlenick, so that you can change your nick back to keepnick.

See the scripts directory on how to re-start your knb from cron automatically.

If you want to use kqemu, you need to mount tmpfs on /dev/shm. This is not problematic, qemu prints a usable error message if you miss that. The problem is that you have to do this again and again after each reboot. If you hate this, then just add the following line to your /etc/fstab:

Howto setup KVpnc for use without root password - sudo

Change your LastFM username and password in /etc/lastfmsubmitd.conf and the MPD server settings in /etc/lastmp.conf before starting the LastFM submit daemon.

After configuring lastfmsubmitd, you should run the following commands to start the daemons:

So, you feel like using lilo, do you? Well, here you will find instructions for configuring lilo to work with Frugalware. Some things to keep in mind:

You will find an example lilo.conf in /etc/lilo.conf already. You will need to tweak it in order for it to match your system’s booting setup. The default structure is designed to reflect the most common setup I know of, but may still require a lot of modifications. For more information on lilo, please refer to man lilo and man lilo.conf.

After installing lineakd, make sure you create a configuration file before starting it.

Example configuration files are located in /usr/share/doc/lineakd-*/.

Don’t forget to copy the configuration file to /etc/lineakd after you create it.

You can then start the lineak daemon by running the following command:

After installing lirc you need to take the following steps:

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 try to run

and say YES at end of sensors-detect to write /etc/sysconfig/lm_sensors.

Then issue:

Here is a mini-HOWTO, a longer one is available here.

First if you are on a setup cd, you need to

and

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 /dev/hdc1.

Let’s initialize them for use by LVM:

Create a volume group titled vg:

Extend it with /dev/hdb1:

Then we can create a logical volume with a size of 400G titled home:

Create a filesystem on it as usual, ie. for ext3:

And now the only task is to mount it as usual, ie:

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:

If you use reiserfs:

To remove a logical volume:

To remove a physical volume from a volume group:

To remove a volume group:

That’s it.

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.

If you like coloured man-pages then you can enable that feature by issuing

It is handled as a configuration file, so feel free to edit the colors in that file if you want.

You have to GRANT some privileges (at least for the operating user) to be able to use this package, as the installer does not GRANT them. The operating user requires ALTER, SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE and even DELETE privileges, regardless that the latter is not mentioned by upstream. For installation, INDEX, CREATE, DELETE, and DROP privileges are also required - this can be carried out if you provide the (MySQL) superuser’s credentials to the installer.

Do not forget to rm -rf /var/www/mantis/admin after a successful install to prevent hijacking your bugtracker, and chage the default administrator’s password.

How to convert each users mbox from /var/mail to Maildir (under /home/$user)?

If you are too lazy to read the complete documentation:

After installing this package, please run /usr/bin/mediawikisetup as root to setup MediaWiki

Do not forget to open port 8080 on your firewall!

To do this, add the following two lines to your /etc/sysconfig/firewall:

for example after MySQL’s entry.

You can set up Monit by adding these lines to /etc/inittab:

You should edit the settings: videodevice, input, norm, frequency, width, height and target_dir in /etc/motion.conf

If the file already exists, it wont be overwritten by the package while upgrading. You can refer /etc/motion-dist.conf for configuring motion.

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:

You should chown any other munin-owned stuff you may have lying around, these are only the default ones.

You can configure MythTV this way:

For more information see MythTV documentation.

Here is an excerpt from the Samba documentation explaining what you need to do to make this work:

Ndiswrapper requires .inf and .sys files from a Windows(tm) driver to function. Download these to /root for example, then run:

After that you can delete them. They will be copied to the proper location. Once done, please run:

Check this list of drivers. You can get your possible hadware with:

Look for that on the above page for your driver.

Please have a look at the wiki for the FAQ, HowTos, Tips, Configuration, and installation information.

Install script has generated default certificate use:

if you need to make a personalized one.

Remember to create a user with:

Use /etc/sysconfig/nessusd for setting nessusd starting arguments.

Install script has generated default certificate use:

if you need to make a personalized one.

Remember to create a user with:

Use /etc/sysconfig/nessusd for setting nessusd starting arguments.

To enable IPv4 multicast DNS lookups, append mdns4 to the hosts line in /etc/nsswitch.conf. Use mdns6 for IPv6 or mdns for both.

Please add /usr/lib/ooextras to your template paths in OpenOffice.org!

You can do this under:
Tools > Options > OpenOffice.org > Paths

Enjoy the new templates! :-)

After this you can access server.com:80 at localhost:8000 even if server.com:80 is not accessible from your machine.

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:

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 8080.

You require the data files of the original Transport Tycoon Deluxe for Windows to play the game. You have to manually copy the following files to /usr/share/openttd/data/

If you want to use the included scenarios, run openttd with the following command:

Copy /etc/pawm.conf to $HOME/.pawm for your own local changes. If you want icons on your desktop, add a file to your $HOME/.pawm directory that starts with "app" and append an alphanumerical phrase of your choice to it. Then, write the file structure as follows:

<icon name> <x position> <y position> <name to display> <command>

Example:

firefox.xpm 40 40 firefox firefox

Other things to remember, you can only use xpm files for this method, and it takes the files from /usr/share/pixmaps. If I knew how to change this path to a directory the user has, I would.

Be sure to make your own file at $HOME/.pekwm/autostart if you use pekwm-session to auto-launch commands when you startup. I know pekwm has a start file for this, but my method launches it only at the start of your session, while the method pekwm uses starts everytime you restart/start pekwm. Use it well. You can find an example below:

dbus-session --exit-with-session --sh-syntax & feh --bg-scale "$HOME/.foo/bar" &

I have purposely left out a few perl modules from the dependencies array, because they are not needed to run perlpanel and drag in a lot of GNOME or other stuff you may not want. Below, you will find a list of these modules and what they do. If you find errors in this documentation, then please report it and I will look into it.

perl-xmms - perlpanel plugin interface to xmms perl-gnome2-vfs - various gnome plugin interfaces for perlpanel libgnomeui - for full libglade support in perlpanel

You should set

in /etc/php.ini in order to use php-cgi.

After installing this package, please run /usr/bin/phpbbsetup as root to setup phpBB

After upgrading, make sure to run the database update script

Pootle provides a separate webserver, after starting it, you should be able to reach it at http://127.0.0.1:8080/.

No-one can login to Pootle by default. You should edit /usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/Pootle/users.prefs, and uncomment the startup user. Its password is startup, too. Then login via the web interface, create an account. Finally edit the configuration file again and comment the startup user.

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:

Append the following lines to /etc/postfix/main.cf:

Finally reload postfix:

That should do it!

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.

To use postgrey, put something along the lines of

in your /etc/postfix/main.cf (postfix 2.1 or newer is required.)

Note: You must find a PSX bios on your own, and place it in ~/.pSX/bios.

You’ll find pyro’s scripts in /usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/Pyro/bin

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:

It worth to read the full documentation at /usr/share/doc/qemu-*/qemu-doc.html, it really worth to do so.

To demonstrate how powerfull qemu is, here are a few cheap tricks:

If you want to be able to ssh to the machine, you can use port derirection. For example using the -redir tcp:1022::22 option, qemu:22 will be available at localhost:1022.

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 sendkey ctrl-alt-delete string to the socket, for example using python:

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! :)

The config files have to be in the /etc/quagga dir and have to be writeable by the quagga user (to be able to save config from the daemon’s shell).

Neither of the daemons will start till you edit the config files and rename/move them from *.conf.sample to *.conf (be careful to the uid/gid).

You have to enable explicitly the routing daemons to get started from the init script. The config file is /etc/sysconfig/quagga

If you have a working firewall, the OSPF daemon will not get working, you have to enable it in the firewall with this rule (maybe other routing daemons also have to be enabled, if you use it, but i could not find anything about that):

iptables -A INPUT -p 89 -m state --state NEW -j ACCEPT

To really activate quotas, you’ll need to add usrquota to the appropriate partitions as listed in /etc/fstab. Here’s an example:

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

then, reboot to create those files.

To edit user quotas, use edquota. See man edquota.

This is the r8169 driver from Realtek. This in not the same r8169 presented in Linux kernel.

This driver supports: RTL8169S/8110S, RTL8169SB/8110SB, RTL8110SC

To use this driver you have to remove the official r8169 if loaded.

You can load this module with

It might be a good idea to blacklist r8169 and add realtek-r8169 to /etc/sysconfig/modules, so you do not have to play this game after every reboot.

Use the included desktop2appfile shell script, if you want an automatic way of converting system installed desktop files in /usr/share/applications to a ROX appdir.

Create a new feed database:

Subscribe to some feeds:

(That’s the feed to be notified when there’s a new version of rss2email.) Repeat this for each feed you want to subscribe to.

When you run rss2email, it emails you about every story it hasn’t seen before. But the first time you run it, that will be every story. To avoid this, you can ask rss2email not to send you any stories the first time you run it:

Then later, you can ask it to email you new stories:

You probably want to set this up as a cron job or something.

There are a few options, described at the top of rss2email.py. If you want to change something, add it to config.py. For example, to be notified every time a post changes, instead of just once per post:

And you can ask rss2email to make the emails look as if they were sent when the item was actually posted:

I have included a simple script called sawfish-session which sources $HOME/.sawfish/startup, if it exists. It is setup so you can easily run your own commands before sawfish is launched. You can find an example file at /usr/share/sawfish/startup. Also, there is a sawfish-aplay script as well, which is a wrapper to aplay with the -q argument so your logs aren’t spammed by a bunch of useless messages if you choose to use sound events. To use sound events in sawfish, run sawfish-ui and goto the Sound tab, and enable sounds. Then, close the program, run it again, and there should a greyed out box at the bottom for entering a command to for playing sounds. I have disabled ESD support in favor of this. Check the box to enable it, and enter either sawfish-aplay or another program of your choice. However, keep in mind this box cannot accept arguments, it can only accept the path to an executable of some sort, which is the whole reason I included an aplay wrapper. Also, be sure to visit http://sawfish.wikia.com if you want to find stuff to supplement sawfish, like scripts, themes, etc. And, finally, you will an example piece of lisp code you can put in your $HOME/.sawfishrc and edit to your heart’s content to get the right root menu for you. This is also where you put lisp code that you want to become active every time you restart sawfish. Use sawfish-client if you want to test it, and remember to put it in your rc file if you wish to retain it. Happy hacking!

(setq root-menu '( ("Editors" ("Abiword" (system "abiword &")) ("Leafpad" (system "leafpad &")) ) ("Terminals" ("Sakura" (system "sakura &")) ("xterm" (system "xterm &")) ) ("Multimedia" ("Audacious" (system "audacious &")) ("VLC" (system "vlc &")) ) ("Network" ("Firefox" (system "firefox &")) ("Pidgin" (system "pidgin &")) ) ("Restart" restart) ("Quit" quit) ))

You need to complete the install, running:

Do not forget to create a scratchbox user:

For further documentation about how to setup scratchbox for your development needs have a look at scratchbox documentation.

Also note that when you reboot and before trying to run scratchbox, you should run:

You can also add it to the default runlevel:

Then to start scratchbox, run:

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:

You’re ready!

Driver for the SpeedTouch USB and SpeedTouch 330

The binaries (modem_run and pppoax) have been installed in /usr/sbin.

You will find the documentation and example script files in: /usr/share/doc/speedtouch-pkgver

You can start configuring your modem by running

Please start the configure script in the /var/www/squirrelmail directory!

You have to install this plugin with squirrelmail’s own ./configure tool.

You have to install this plugin with squirrelmail’s own ./configure tool.

You need some additional configuration before stunnel will be functional:

Adjust the configuration file:

Genrate your certificate:

Hide the certificate from users:

Now you can enable and start the service:

In order to use the sugarcrm, you have to symlink it to somewhere. For example, if you want to use it under http://localhost/sugarcrm, then use:

After installing this package, please run in a browser http://localhost/sugarcrm/install.php to setup SugarSuite (sugarcrm).

After installing trac you need a few steps to set it up. First of all do not forget to install postgresql/mysql/sqlite according to which database backend you want to use.

To create a new trac project, just use the command:

You can check the result with:

Then, fire up a browser and visit http://localhost:8000

For further documentation on trac, how to set up with different HTTP daemons see TracGuide

/lib/udev/devices is the directory where packages or you can place real device nodes, which get copied over to /dev at every boot. This replaces our previous /etc/sysconfig/udev solution. (The change was recommended by upstream.)

Create a big empty file:

Format it:

Mount it:

Install base and openssh:

Create etc/fstab with the following contents:

Create etc/sysconfig/keymap with the following contents:

Create etc/profile.d/lang.sh with the following contents:

We want networking, put the followings to etc/sysconfig/network/default:

If you want to use multiple virtual machines, use 192.168.0.2, 192.168.0.3 and so on instead.

Let’s copy in the terminal device and change our root:

Create a regular user:

Remove unnecessary services and enable ssh:

Remove unnecessary packages:

Change /etc/inittab so that ctrl-alt-del will halt (and not reboot the system). Change the line

to

Exit from the chroot and umount:

You’re ready, let’s register it!

You should edit /etc/sysconfig/uml. Each item in the machines array defines a virtual machine. Here is an example:

This does the following:

First you need the tun kernel module:

Second, you need NAT. Let’s assume you access the external network via the eth0 interface, then edit /etc/sysconfig/network/default and search the end of the [eth0] section. Just append

to the section. After a

NAT will be enabled.

Now you can easily start/stop your machines using the usual service uml start/stop command.

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 /etc/fstab:

To be able to play, you must have the IWAD files of the original games and copy it in ~/.vavoom or in /usr/share/vavoom. You can find this IWAD file on the original game CD or in the net. You can use shareware game’s IWAD, too.

If you want to enable spell check support, you need to:

where xx is code of the requested language.

Some languages need correctly set encoding. If you get a message like:

then you need to set your encoding as well:

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:

It may be handy to have map function keys in ~/.vimrc to enable / disable the spell check support:

See the upstream documentation for more info about spell check support:

If you want to be able to use the VirtualBox guest additions, run this command as root to get the Additions ISO (requires an active Internet connection):

Don’t forget to change the wifi interface name in /etc/wifi-radar.conf!

Running x11vnc without a password is not recommended. To create one, type:

Then you can start the VNC server using

if are logged in on :0.

Please take a look on xcache wiki.

How should I remote control xmms from xchat?

First make sure you really need it - some people think it’s a security hole.

You need XChat-XMMS plugin from XChat’s Scripts + Plugins section, and some other packages (mostly Perl modules) which I’m too lazy to search for, but are available in fpm. Unpack the tarball, copy the .pl script to your XChat dir, and (try to) load it. If it complains about missing Perl modules, install them and try again. (This script has some minor bugs, but was found to be the most useful one amongst the kind. The documentation is a German PDF, which is to be translated to English/Hungarian.)

To use this theme, please add -config /etc/X11/xdm/frugalware/xdm-config to your xdm environmental variable in /etc/sysconfig/desktop and restart xdm.

First of all, read the INSTALL file for the instructions.

For lazy users, here’s what i had to do to get the driver working:

This section describes how to setup Xgl or AIGLX depending on which graphics card you have.

This section describes how to setup Xgl/AIGLX on computers having Intel Graphics Cards. First, make sure that the Intel Xorg drivers are installed. You can install it using:

I would recommend using AIGLX and NOT xgl for intel users. This is because Xgl works extremely slow on such cards. On the other hand, AIGLX is much faster than Xgl and is easier to setup. This section describes how to setup AIGLX for Intel GMA series cards.

You have to edit the /etc/X11/xorg.conf as root.

Look for Section "Module" and make sure that the following lines exist in that section

Now, look for Section "Device" and add the following lines to it

And add this to Section "ServerLayout"

Now look for Section "DRI". Create it if it doesn’t exist and make sure it looks like the following

Finally, add this line to Section "Extensions"

Save the file and exit the editor. Reboot your system. Your system should now be set up to use Compiz Fusion. Now read on to the Window Manager setup section!

If you have an nVidia card, you’re in luck - you can use all the fancy effects without the need for Xgl. This means you’ll get much better performance. First of all, you’ll need the latest nVidia drivers (100.14.11-6). Install them if you haven’t already done it.

Now, as i stated earlier, you can use it with or without Xgl. Both the ways are described below.

===== Without XGL

You have to edit the /etc/X11/xorg.conf as root.

First find the Device section for your nVidia card. Add the following line to it:

Now go to the Screen section. Make sure the following lines are there:

Finally, make sure the Composite extension is enabled. If it’s not, add these lines to the bottom of the file:

Save the file, and then reboot. Your system should now be set up to use Compiz Fusion.

===== With XGL

This section describes how to use Xgl on a system with an Nvidia card. First of all, you’ll need to install Xgl. This can be done by running:

Once installed, xgl can be enabled by initiating the following command (as root) :

To disable Xgl, run the following command (as root) :

Every time xgl is enabled or disabled, you need to restart GDM. This can be done by running the following command (as root) :

Now read on to the Window Manager setup section!

Now you need to install a window manager to be able to get all these fancy effects. Frugalware currently has compiz-fusion window manager that can be used with XGL or AIGLX. Note that Frugalware no longer supports Beryl.

This section describes how to setup / use Compiz Fusion as the window manager with XGL / AIGLX depending on your Desktop environment.

===== XFCE

Run the following command (as root) to install the necessary packages:

Now you can simply fire up Fusion Icon from your Xfce menu. An icon should appear in your system tray. Right click it and go to Select Window Manager. Choose "Compiz" from the list. If at any time you wish to return to your normal window manager, just select it from the fusion icon.

If it works, you should add fusion-icon to the startup programs in your desktop environment. This can be done by going to Settings → Autostarted Applications in your Xfce menu.

===== GNOME

Run the following command (as root) to install the necessary packages:

Now you can simply fire up Fusion Icon from your GNOME menu. An icon should appear in your system tray. Right click it and go to Select Window Manager. Choose "Compiz" from the list. If at any time you wish to return to your normal window manager, just select it from the fusion icon.

If it works, you should add fusion-icon to the startup programs so that it automatically starts everytime you login into GNOME. This can be done by going to System → Preferences → Sessions → Startup Programs in your Gnome menu.

By default, compiz-gnome is shipped with gtk-window-decorator. Gnome users can also use Emerald as a window decorator with compiz. To install emerald, run (as root):

Once installed, you can switch to emerald as the window decorator. To do this, just right click the Fusion icon, navigate to "Select Window Decorator" and select "emerald" from the list.

===== KDE

Run the following command (as root) to install the necessary packages:

You can now use compiz by starting Fusion Icon from the KDE menu.

By default, compiz-kde is shipped with kde-window-decorator. Kde users can also use Emerald as a window decorator with compiz. To install emerald, run (as root):

Once installed, you can switch to emerald as the window decorator. To do this, just right click the Fusion icon, navigate to "Select Window Decorator" and select "emerald" from the list.

If no penguins appear on your desktop after you hit the launch button, go in KDE Control Center → LookNFeel → Behavior and make sure Allow programs in desktop window is checked.

The purpose of this document is to define rules that helps the communication on the mailing lists of Frugalware Linux.

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.

Developers are supposed to read the -devel and -users mailing lists, and supposed to be subscribed to the -git list.

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 about 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.)

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.

We have our own archive of our mailing lists here. Gmane also provides searchable archives.

This document describes the rules to be followed by everyone who joins the users' and/or developers' IRC channels of Frugalware Linux.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 ;-)

command.

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 here as quickly as possible.

Frugalware consists of thousands of packages. Each files in the distribution belong to some package. You can easily query which package does the specified file belong to. If you want to know which package contains /etc/frugalware-release, you should use:

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 true for console/graphical applications: if your applications/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.

but you should use:

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.

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.

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

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 used use the -R option to build the package in a chroot-ed environment. Since 0.5 building in chroot is the default methot, you have to use -H if you want to build on the host system. Chroot requires root privileges. To allow 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"

to

‘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).

You can alter the result of the build process using environment variables without touching the FrugalBuild itself. The git package is a good example. Using

for that package results in a build of git’s development version. Here is what you need if you want so for your package:

In the next section we will see an example for a simple FrugalBuild script.

Let’s see a simple example, the FrugalBuild script of the cabextract package.

And here comes the description for each line:

# Compiling Time: 0.06 SBU

You should write here how much time did it take 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:

SBU="257"

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: VMiklos <vmiklos@frugalware.org>

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.

pkgname=cabextract

This will be the name of the package. It’s allowed to include numbers, hyphens (-), etc., and should be lowercase.

pkgver=1.2

The package’s version. Hyphens are not allowed, so a 1.0-6111 will be usually converted to 1.0_6111.

pkgrel=1

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.

url="http://www.kyz.uklinux.net/cabextract.php"

The website of the project.

‘depends=('glibc\’)`

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.

‘groups=('apps\’)`

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.

Example:

‘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 ourself, don’t include it.

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:

source=(http://www.kyz.uklinux.net/downloads/$pkgname-$pkgver.tar.gz)

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 where the FrugalBuild script is. 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 will be 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 compess it first. After this one can use a http://ftp.frugalware.org/pub/other/sources/pkgname/foo-styled URL for those big sources.

‘sha1sums=('094e3afb2fe8dfe82f63731cdcd3b999f4856cff\’)`

Another bash array to prevent compiling from wrong sources. 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 have wrote some F* functions to make our work easier. It’s somethin 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:

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.

# 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. Until 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.

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:

‘backup=('etc/pacman-g2.conf\’)`

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 to depends() would causecircular 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 package almost the same, but the binaries differs. In this case the mutt package must also contain this line: ‘conflicts=('mutt-devel\’)`. Of course, if two or more packages conflict each other, 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.

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:

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.

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!

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.

See man kernel-module.sh for more info.

Repoman is simple tool to download all packages' buildscript and compile programs from source.

The most commonly used repoman commands are the followings:

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!).

There are many different ways to contribute to Frugalware. You can write documentation, translate the existing ones to your native language (or any other language you want to) maintain packages or making them better whith adding features whatever.

If you are a programmer you can help us in developing our applications. These are: pacman-g2, gfpm, fwlive, frugalwareutils, setup etc. See git.frugalware.org for different project repositories.

You can also start new projects. If you show some code we can surely host your project too if it’s frugalware related. For example you want to write kfpm :)

You can read the details on our Translations documentation page.

In the first part i will cover the necessary informations for those who do not have developer status yet.

In the second part we will set up the necessary config files.

First of all, we ask you to read the following documentations carefully. If you do not want to deal with packages, just want to code it’s usually enough to read the git documentation as we store our code in git repositories.

I know, it is boring reading documentation, but you have to know that writing them is even worse so do not ask questions when there is the answer in the documentation. If you can not understand something feel free to join #frugalware@irc.freenode.net and ask.

The frugalware-current repo is the development repo for the packages.

When you want to get it you need the git package. Let’s get it:

Now create a git directory where you can hold all your repos. You can choose any other name of course.

Now clone the repo with git:

Now be patient while git clones all the objects and then checks out the files. Also you can use other mirrors as well.

First of all you need the repo of the program. In this example i will use pacman-g2, but the steps are very similar. NOTE: Most of our programs need the translations repo to compile)

Now you should setup up your identity.

Now you can make your changes. When finished run

in the repository.

If you satisfied with the changes run

to commit all your changes.

If you want to cherry-pick hunks from your changes:

or using native git commands:

Without committing your changes you can not send nor push (just developers) it.

Here comes the final step. Send in the patch(es)!

<hash> is the sha1 of the last patch you do not want to submit. Run

and you’ll see the hash. Also, you can just use your existing mail client and send the patch(es) as an attachment.

If everything goes fine your patch should show up on the frugalware-devel mailing list soon.

Not really belongs to here but I want to document it somewhere. If you are a developer and want to apply such a patch, you need:

to:

You should do this in the root directory of the repository.

Once you get a developer account, you have the right to request the following services:

What you should do:

Let us see what you should set up to get it work. I will also give some tips which can make your life easier.

Read this page, we collected a set of tricks when we converted from darcs to git.

It is time to set up some necessary things. We start with the frugalware-current repo. Make sure that you are in the root of the frugalware-current repo. Also do not forget to change the username to your login name on git.frugalware.org.

As you will use repoman to upload the packages (and many other things as you’ll see) we should set it up now. This step is also necessary. Open ~/.repoman.conf with your favourite editor and add the following lines:

Where fst_root is the directory where you store your git repos. Username is your login on git.frugalware.org. For details see man repoman.

As from now use the following command from package’s directory to push your changes.

It will check the FrugalBuild using fblint, then records your changes, pushes them, uploads the fpms and finally creates the changelog, updates the fdb etc. So you are done if there was no error message.

In repo’s main directory:

Do not forget to change the username and repository path. For paths refer to the gitweb interface.

You should always review what you would push before you perform the action:

Then you can use

to send in your changes.

This document documents the work of the Frugalware Security Team. Primarily it’s for new developers or for existing developers who started to work in the Security Team.

You can also read other mailing list, like https://lists.grok.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/full-disclosure, but secunia monitors them, so you won’t miss anything. (You just notice things later.)

Secunia announces sec issues days after they released so there is a good chance to find a patch.

So it’s good to read the secunia mails carefully as you’ll always know when the patch is available.

We use integers in pkgrels for normal packages, but -stable updates are different. Here are the cases:

(Replace kalgan with the current release name, later.)

This ensures the followings:

This document is for developers who want to publish a git repository on the Frugalware FTP Server and on the Frugalware Gitweb Interface.

Since a repository consists of plain files, we can and should place them on the ftp server (/pub). To prevent further problems, always use the server name "git.frugalware.org", currently it’s an alias of genesis.frugalware.org.

First decide if it’s a personal repository or a team one. For example if you create a repository to update to a newer python version, then probably you will do all the work, create it under /pub/other/people/nick/reponame.

The steps are:

Now anyone can git clone it, using a full mirror, for example http://www12.frugalware.org/mirrors/ftp.frugalware.org/pub/.

If the repository is a team one, then create it under /pub/other. In this case probably you want the gitweb interface, too. To use it:

After some time (a maximum of 30 minutes) it should appear at http://git.frugalware.org/.

Currently you need hooks for the following reasons: . If you don’t use bare repositories, then the content outside .git won’t be updated automatically, you need a hook to do so.

For the last one:

For the others:

You MUST follow this HOWTO when bumping GNOME to a new version (even a minor version).

To start, packages must be compiled in the order listed below (if you find a change that needs making to this list, poke AlexExtreme). If it is a major bump (2.14 to 2.16, for example), it is wise to rebuild most of the GNOME packages.

(*) - don’t use Fsplit on this package.

Never, i repeat, NEVER bump a version without doing the following:

The aim of this howto is to show what’s the procedure of a stable Frugalware release. The to-be-created release in this howto is 0.5, the previous release is 0.4.

Just because I don’t know where to document this, here is the command line what I use to sync changes from -current to -testing before a release:

Copy the full tree on genesis:

Now one have two tree. All what one should do in -current is to bump --from-tag version to 0.5 in tools/genpkgs.

Done!

This document details the requirements that must be met by all artwork if it is to be accepted into the official Frugalware gallery.