Frugalware 1.8rc2 (Gaia) Documentation

First there are some part of this document that you should really read, to understand how Frugalware works and how to administer it.

Throughout this document, there is boxed text which shows you console output. These are important and require quite some attention since most of the time you are expected to run them and get the same output.

This is how a console log look. Let’s look at its details so you understand what it means.

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

<<<>>>

You may wonder what differentiates the command from the output. You see that in front of the command there is a $. This indicates that it’s a command line, but there is more meaning in this symbol. This symbol can change depending on the user privileges required to run the command.

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’s original init scripts were written by Patrick J. Volkerding, creator of the Slackware Linux distribution. We release out additions under the GPL, but Patrick J. Volkerding’s code is still under the BSD license. Frugalware also has a few side projects, like our pacman-g2 package manager, the Frugalware installer an so on. They are available under the GPL license, too. For more info about the license of the packages included in Frugalware, refer to the /usr/share/doc/*/COPYING files.”

What package manager does Frugalware use?

“We have our own package manager, called pacman-g2. It stands for the second generation of the pacman-g1 package manager, as it was originally based on Judd Vinet’s great work. The packages are simple .tar.bz2 files, pacman-g2 is written in C, unlike Slackware’s shellscript-based package manager (which may be rather slow sometimes).”

How does Frugalware manage updating obsolete packages?

“We don’t have any standalone program for updating packages as pacman-g2 manages this task too. To update your package database, use pacman-g2 -Sy, and to update your packages according the just synchronized package database, you use pacman-g2 -Su. To install package foo with the necessary dependencies directly from one of our ftp servers, you should issue 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 developers or with other users and to get help. You can reach the list of mailing lists available here. The IRC channels are on the Freenode network (server: irc.freenode.net), the discussion forums are available here.”

Is there any commercial support available for Frugalware?

“No, there isn’t for now, and currently it isn’t planned, either.”

For whom is Frugalware recommended to use?

“Frugalware is designed for intermediate users. Installing Frugalware doesn’t require any magic, of course, but you should read some documentation if you don’t know what a partition, an MBR (Master Boot Record), etc. is.”

How to become a developer?

“Get involved! :) Download the FST (Frugalware Source Tree) using the 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 for a previously non-existent package. They write documentation, fix bugs, provides support, or anything else in connection with the Frugalware community. If you want to help us, but you don’t want to be a developers, you may help in translating Frugalware to your or other language. And, of course, we happily accept donations. :) More info here.”

Who develops Frugalware?

“An amazing group of volunteers, who are motived by the users to do so. They also do it as a hobby, and they are always working on having up to date knowledge to make Frugalware even better for you.”

Is Frugalware specialized in a certain purpose?

“No, it’s a general purpose distribution, for desktops, mobile computers and servers.”

Do you plan to release a live cd?

“Well, we have already a live cd, called FwLive. Currently it supports only i686, but an x86_64 version is also under development. You can find it in the standard release directories.”

Does Frugalware support languages other than English?

“Yes, it supports all languages supported by the packages. If the init scripts, the setup or the documentation is not available in your language, then it simply means they haven’t yet been translated.”

What about Asian languages?

“Frugalware roughly supports Asian languages, but don’t expect too much - using UTF8 is not the default where it is possible.”

What architectures does Frugalware support?

“Currently we support x86 (Pentium Pro or higher), x86_64 (k8, aka. amd64) platforms and arm”

How are compressed the Frugalware packages ?

“FPM packages were originally .tar.gz packages, then a bit later we migrated to libarchive, which allowed bzip2 compression. Life was good, but then lzma was came, and I added support for libarchive, though others were not really interested in a migration, so we stick to .tar.bz2. A few months ago libarchive got support for the xz format (which is the successor of lzma), so we switched to it. pacman-g2 still support .tar.gz and .tar.bz2 as well, and the package extension is .fpm all the time to make it clear that it’s a Frugalware package”

Given that the number of selected packages to install makes a lot of difference, there is no general answer. Though the followings are recommended for a default install:

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

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.

The aim of this howto is to show how you can upgrade a Frugalware-1.7 (Gaia) system to Frugalware-1.8 (Cinna).

Some packages will not gracefully be removed because of strict dependencies. Here is the command to remove them before an upgrade:

The new release comes with an improved pacman-g2, you should install it first:

Now it’s time to upgrade the system itself:

You will be asked to replace some packages automatically. These are normal and you are expected to answer Y to these questions (or just hit ENTER).

After this, the list of to-be-upgraded packages is displayed. Just hit enter and wait. Make some tea, it can take a while. :-)

pacman-g2 does not touch configuration files in case you customized them. You should run

and update each configuration file based on the .pacnew version. Once you’re done with one, you should remove the .pacnew file.

GRUB2 has been upgraded to its latest release. Please check your grub config under /etc/default/grub and compare it to the /etc/default/grub.pacnew file and update it as needed. The main things to look for is changing the GRUB_BACKGROUND to /boot/grub/background.png and removing splash from GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT, as plymouth has been removed. Also, please feel free to look at what is new in the default config. You may find something you wish to try out.

Now that your config has been updated, it’s time to upgrade GRUB2 in your MBR. Running grubconfig as root should be enough to complete this task for you, provided grubconfig worked for you when you originally installed or upgraded to 1.7. If it is not, please try these commands, making sure to replace DEVICE wit the device node of the hard drive your root partition is on:

/etc/sysconfig/keymap and /etc/sysconfig/font is now replaced by systemd’s /etc/vconsole.conf. If you still have those files around after the upgrade, please manually merge their contents to vconsole.conf, and then remove those files.

/etc/sysconfig/language and /etc/profile.d/lang.sh is now replaced by systemd’s /etc/locale.conf. These should be automatically converted to /etc/locale.conf upon upgrade, but if not then you should manually merge the LANG variable from /etc/profile.d/lang.sh to /etc/locale.conf.

Also, if the new /etc/locale.conf file does not have .utf8 at the end of your LANG variable, then you should manually append it. We will no longer be supporting any other locale character encoding after this stable release.

This change is badly needed for many terminal applications and terminal emulators to function in unicode.

Finally, when you are done with the conversion, you should remove the file.

Since the kernel is upgraded, too, you have to reboot your machine.

Done!

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, a /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d directory will be created for you, containing XOrg configuration fragment files. In most cases the default configuration will be enough for you, but you can place your own fragments there if you want to manually fine-tune some of the settings.

A common problem is to use a keyboard layout different to the default of the locale, for example you have a non-English locale, thus the default keyboard layout isn’t English, either, but you want to have such one. In that case you need to edit the evdev configuration:

and change the xkb_layout option there to us, for example.

If there is built-in 3d acceleration support for your card in X, UDev will detect the necessary drivers and X will enable support for them.

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

By default, no root login is permitted on the GUI, the recommended way of running graphical programs as root is to use gksu or kdesu.

To enable it anyway, the following lines should be edited:

For KDM (/etc/kde/config/kdm/kdmrc)

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

commands.

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

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 the OpenPrinting site whether if is supported under Linux or not. Usually it’s enough to install the proper printer driver (see above) or gutenprint. After installing do not forget to restart cups:

If it’s not on the page mentioned above, then try to Google after. If listed but said to be "paperweight", then there is nothing to do. If it is supported and said to be working on the site, then please file a bug report with your printer details. While we fix the bug, you can install the driver (the ppd) by yourself.

On the left side, select Printer Listings. Then select your device’s vendor and proper type. On the results page, select download PPD. After download, there will be a file named someting_that_ends_with.ppd.

Save the PPD file in the directory /usr/share/cups/model/. The PPD file doesn’t have to be executable, but it should be world-readable and should have the file extension ".ppd".

If you do not want to search ppd, try to install foomatic-filters-ppds package. It has a bunch of ppd files for various printers.

Then restart the CUPS service: su -c \'service cups restart\'. The driver installation is now completed, now you can add your printer via the web interface. A good howto can be found at 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 that if you create a device node manually, it will exist only until the next shutdown/reboot.

If you want to force Frugalware to create a device node "manually" during each boot, you must create a device file under /lib/udev/devices: it will be copied on each boot automatically.

The udev needs sysfs, so it will only work with the 2.6.x kernel series. Do not try to run udev on Frugalware with kernel series 2.4.x.

Pendrives (also known as thumbdrives, or USB keys) are well-supported through the hotplug scripts and udev. If you insert a pendrive into the USB slot, udev will create a device node for it in /dev. Most pendrives contain only one partition and their filesystem is vfat. In most cases, the pendrive will behave like a SCSI disc. It means, you can find the pendrive under /dev/sda and its first partition under /dev/sda1. Adding the following line to /etc/fstab:

/dev/sda1 /media/pendrive auto defaults,noauto,user 0 0

will allow users to mount their pendrive if the device node exists (if the device is inserted into the slot).

If you use KDE, Gnome or XFCE4 they will handle automatic mounting of such devices. You should not edit /etc/fstab as automounting will not work for you. For blackbox, fluxbox, englightenment, e17 and other smaller window manager users there is ivman for automounting, but it may not work as well as in KDE, Gnome, XFCE4. See also the automounting part of the documentation.

Typically, there are two types of digital cameras. Some of them support both access methods, others use only one of them. First, most of the cameras can be treated as a pendrive (USB Mass Storage device), you can mount them and copy the pictures from them easily.

Other cameras support the Picture Transfer Protocol (PTP). You can grab the pictures from them (and do lots of other actions) with 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 does 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 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 is provided by systemd, its service files are always called something.service and they are located in /lib/systemd/system. They are used to setup the environment and manage system services.

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

In the following examples we will explain how to alter the running state of a given service. You will have to replace $service_name$ with the wanted service name, for example crond.service. As you will see the syntax is simple, and you may get more help looking at the systemctl manual doing:

If you don’t pass any extra init=/path/to/init parameters to it, the kernel will start /sbin/init as the final step of the kernel boot sequence. According to /etc/systemd/system/default.target, init will run:

If X11 is configured, prefdm.service 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 a nice splash screen and a progress bar instead of text messages during the boot procedure. Splashy is completely user-space, so there is no need for patching the kernel. If you dislike it or want to switch it off for whatever reason add nosplashy for your kernel parameters in /boot/grub/menu.lst. For example:

Donations of money are welcome and will be used to cover costs such as domain name registration, hosting costs (hardware, bandwidth etc). If you want to donate, please use the "Donation" link on the Frugalware home page.

Comprehensive, multi-lingual documentation is very important to us because we want Frugalware to be available to as many people as possible. If you have the required linguistic knowledge, you could help translate various pieces of work. These include our own applications, documentation, web site etc.

In the Bug Tracking System, are requests for packages, from Frugalware’s users. The process of making packages is well documented in the http://frugalware.org/docs/stable/index-devel [Frugalware Developer Documentation], and with some GNU/Linux experience, you could contribute in that way. Existing package maintainers are always available to help you, especially if you’re new to packaging.

Frugalware has several of its own applications, including: * An ncurses installer; * A GUI installer (fwife); * A GUI package management tool (gfpm); * A command-line package manager (pacman-g2); * A GUI runlevel manager (gservice).

Help in further developing and enhancing these applications is welcome.

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 in this area, you’re welcome to join the artwork team.

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

If you find bugs, you can help by submitting well-written bug reports, 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 such as "I can reproduce this, too." or "I would enjoy this feature, too."

There are a few topics which are often requested / reported but we have a good reason not fixing / implementing them. You can see a list of such topics in the wiki.

If you’d like to report an outdated package, first check that it isn’t listed on this site. If the 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 our packages.)

If you request a package, please include:

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 buildscripts - finally to become a developer if possible. Opening a task for your FrugalBuild is still fine if you want us to maintain it after the initial version is accepted.

Please don’t link other distribution’s buildscripts when you request a package. That information is useless for us in most cases and if you don’t include such links, you make our life easier.

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 critical, then it will be fixed/implemented only in git, without increasing the package release. This means that it will be automatically included in the next release.

Notebook users are usually interested in the state of their battery. Getting the power button and the lid’s sensor of its closed state to emit events is also nice. Some notebooks only shut down their continously running fans and operate only if needed if the thermal module is loaded.

Usually these modules are automatically loaded by udev. If it does not do so for you, then add the following lines to /etc/sysconfig/modules to get modules loaded at system startup:

The next task is to enable the acpid service:

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 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

The new line:

kernel (hd0,2)/boot/vmlinuz ro root=/dev/hda3 quiet resume=/dev/hda2

After the above are done, you must reboot. The hibernation can be started with:

echo shutdown > /sys/power/disk; echo disk > /sys/power/state

and next time you boot your kernel it should resume. For more info, look at /usr/src/linux/Documentation/power/swsusp.txt. It requires the kernel documentation, which can be installed issuing the pacman-g2 -S kernel-docs command as root.

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.

Setting up Android SDK :

You should open a new shell to have android-sdk/tools/ in the path. After that, just type "adb" (not "./adb") as mentionned in following links.

If you want to use your Android phone as a proxy, see these pages :

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:

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.

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:

Configure your hardware specific options under /etc/sysconfig/cpupower. See the man pages for cpupower-frequency-set and cpupower-set for more information. When you are finished configuring, use this command as root to enable it at boot time:

Follow these steps to when using cryptsetup-luks:

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:

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

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

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.

Evenbalance, developer of Punkbuster dropped support for Wolfenstein Enemy Territory (ET). Also the Punkbusterinstaller isn`t able to install the neccessary files for Enemy Territory. So if you got disconnected from servers and getting some #20004 errors, you can run et-pbupdate instead of pbweb. You can read more: http://etkey.org/

To configure fbterm, please edit /etc/fbtermrc.

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

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:

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:

If you want to use web2png, you must install python.

pacman-g2 -S python == git

For have a full bluetooth support with gnome install obex-data-server # pacman-g2 -S obex-data-server

It is no longer acceptable to edit your grub configuration manually since upgrading to grub2. Instead, it is advised to insert any customizations you require in /etc/sysconfig/grub-config and /etc/sysconfig/grub-custom.

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.

Configuration examples can be found in /etc/hostapd. You must edit the following files located in /etc/hostapd to configure hostapd:

hostapd.allow hostapd.conf hostapd.deny

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.

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:

First of all, we have to install package called keychain. (pacman-g2 -S keychain)

In the next step we have to create a new key. A key stands from two parts, a public and a private part. It means two different files in your ~/.ssh/ directory.

Your key is generated by a program called ssh-keygen. It’s a part of openssh package. Run ssh-keygen -t dsa! You’ll see something like this:

It’ll generate for us the two parts of the key. The program asks where do you want to save the keys, it’s good to simply push an enter. After that You have to type in the passphrase of the key two times. It’s really important to chose a hard passphrase. It should contain lower-/uppercase characters, digits, possibly special characters too. The length must be at least 10 characters! We have to type in this passphrase only once after every restart we shouldn’t choose an easy one.

If everything works fine, then we have an id_dsa and an id_dsa.pub file in our ~/.ssh/ directory.

Now, we would like to use our newly generated key. We have to do the following:

Good to know, that this time(I mean when we run scp and ssh commands) we can’t use our key’s passphrase, so we have to use our password on the remore_machine. If it’s done without any mistake on next login the remote_machine will ask for our key’s passphrase.

And here comes keychain. In openssh package there is a program called ssh-agent. You can store keys in ssh-agent. Keychain just makes easier using of ssh-agent and adds some new features.

This time i assume that we use bash. If we would like to use keychain with an other shell, then we can use man keychain:-) So, let’s take out favourite editor and add the following lines to ~/.bash_profile file:

ksplice is handy in case there is a serious security fix and you don’t want or can’t afford rebooting your system immediately.

Let’s pick an example, the kernel-2.6.28-6anacreon3 update, which added CVE-2009-2692.patch.

First update FST so that you will have the patch:

Now create a working dir:

Now create the ksplice update:

Then apply it:

To view all applies updates, or a specific one:

To revert one:

Howto setup KVpnc for use without root password - sudo

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.

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 change the default administrator’s password.

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

For enable mod_mono module apache don’t forget to define the User/Group directives into /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf. For test the configuration of mod_mono into /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf : #mono settings Alias /demo /usr/lib/xsp/test MonoApplications "/demo:/usr/lib/xsp/test" MonoServerPath /usr/lib/mono/2.0/mod-mono-server2.exe <Directory /usr/lib/xsp/test> SetHandler mono </Directory> and check the result : http://localhost/demo/

You may want to forge a config file for yourself as /etc/monit/monitrc to be able to properly use Monit. Consult the online docs for details:

http://mmonit.com/monit/documentation/monit.html

After doing so you should issue a systemctl enable monit.service command to make use of this service.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

If you wish to use the gmysql or gpgsql backends with a local server, then follow these instructions.

For gmysql, install mysql package.

For gpgsql, install postgresql package.

Now, copy /lib/systemd/system/pdns.service to /etc/systemd/system/pdns.service.

Uncomment the lines appropriate for your selected backend. The comments in the file will guide you. After all this, you must still ensure the specific database backend you are wanting to use is properly configured. This means both the pdns configuration and the setup for the mysql or postgresql daemon. Refer to pdns, mysql, and/or postgresql documentation for more information.

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

This package contains a script for finding the optimal voltage while maintaining system stability. During the process, your system will mostly likely crash multiple times before you find the right settings. Make sure you are not running or doing anything important while using this script. Keep a backup of essential data in case of data loss.

Now, you will need to run this script as root or have sudo privileges. In addition, you need to have installed either phc-intel or phc-k8 and have compatible hardware. Run this command as root or regular user with sudo privileges, and follow the interactive prompts it gives you.

It will save the results from testing in a file called phc_tweaked_vids in the directory it was executed from. This process should be repeated for each VID value. After all this work, you should have your final set of VIDs.

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

Before you can use this package, you must edit the configuration for it in the file /etc/sysconfig/pm-radeon. After you are done, run this command to enable it at startup.

In most cases you want to use pootle with mysql and apache. See here on how to configure them:

Also read these pages if you’re upgrading from Pootle 1.x:

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.

Should you want to make use of the autoreply (vacation) feature, install these packages as well: perl-mail-sender, perl-email-valid, perl-mime-charset, perl-log-dispatch, perl-mime-encwords, perl-params-validate and read upstream’s /var/www/postfixadmin/VIRTUAL_VACATION/INSTALL.TXT in order to setup autoreply (vacation) properly. Don’t forget to enable it in config.inc.php as well!

To use postgrey, put something along the lines of

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

Don’t forget to change /etc/prosody.cfg.lua when needed For more informations about prosody’s configurtion, please take a look at : http://prosody.im/doc

If you want to add or delete JIDs you have to be in the prosody group You can do it with this command : usermod -aG prosody LOGIN_NAME

To start the daemon, type service prosody start To automaticly start the daemon at boot time, type service prosody add Please do NOT use prosodyctl start and stop

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

Because PulseAudio can be used as drop-in replacement for ESD you can fool GNOME into loading the PulseAudio daemon just like the traditional ESD daemon. To achieve this use the esdcompat script shipped with PulseAudio. Install pulseaudio-esd : pacman-g2 -S pulseaudio-esd Create a symlink from /usr/bin/esd to /usr/bin/esdcompat For more information on pulseaudio, please refer to http://www.pulseaudio.org/wiki/PerfectSetup

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

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.

Post Installation :

Create an empty database and accompanying user named redmine for example.

For Mysql: create database redmine character set utf8; create user redmine@localhost identified by my_password; grant all privileges on redmine.* to redmine@localhost;

For PostegreSQL: create database redmine character set utf8; create user redmine@localhost identified by my_password; grant all privileges on redmine.* to redmine@localhost;

Edit config/database.yml

Generate a session store secret: cd /var/www/html/redmine/ rake config/initializers/session_store.rb

Create the database structure, by running the following command under the application root directory: RAILS_ENV=production rake db:migrate It will create tables and an administrator account.

Insert default configuration data in database, by running the following command: RAILS_ENV=production rake redmine:load_default_data

Fix permissions mkdir tmp public/plugin_assets chown -R redmine:redmine files log tmp public/plugin_assets chmod -R 755 files log tmp public/plugin_assets

Test the installation by running WEBrick web server: ruby script/server webrick -e production see the result : http://localhost:3000/

SMTP Configuration : Copy config/email.yml.example to config/email.yml and edit this file to adjust your SMTP settings.

see http://www.redmine.org/wiki/redmine/RedmineInstall

For use Apache : http://www.redmine.org/wiki/redmine/HowTo_configure_Apache_to_run_Redmine

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) ))

Once the installation is complete, make sure you load the kernel modules:

# modprobe videodev # modprobe smartcam

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:

Generate 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).

All the configurable defaults in SYSLINUX can be changed by putting a file called syslinux.cfg.

SYSLINUX searches for the SYSLINUX.CFG file in the following order:

/boot/syslinux/syslinux.cfg /syslinux/syslinux.cfg /syslinux.cfg

Here is a simple example syslinux.cfg file, with one entry to boot a Linux kernel:

DEFAULT linux LABEL linux SAY Now booting the kernel from SYSLINUX… KERNEL vmlinuz.img APPEND ro root=/dev/sda1

see http://syslinux.zytor.com/wiki/index.php/SYSLINUX for the complete documentation.

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

Follow this as user:

1) Copy the Tremulous pk3s (data-1.1.0.pk3, vms-1.1.0.pk3, map-atcs-1.1.0.pk3, etc) from their installation directory to /home/<user>/.tremulous/base/"

(Use slocate data-1.1.0.pk3 to find it)

2) Copy z-tremfusion-menu-0.99r3.pk3 to /home/<user>/.tremulous/tremfusion/

(Create the directory if it doesn’t exist)

3) Copy gamex86.so to /home/<user>/.tremulous/base/

If you want to use aria2-plugin, first install aria2 package: pacman-g2 -S aria2 == util-linux

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:

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.

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.

The purpose of this document is to define rules that help 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 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.

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 ;-)

Please avoid them, doing so makes the signal-to-noise ratio higher. See the Away messages suck article for further reasons.

This signature does not guarantee that the Frugalware Linux Archives master site itself has not been compromised. However, if we suffer an intrusion we will revoke the key and post information on the home page as quickly as possible.

Frugalware consists of thousands of packages. Each file in the distribution belongs to a package and you can easily query to which package a file belongs. For example, if you want to know which package contains /etc/frugalware-release, you should use:

If you browse the FST (Frugalware Source Tree), you can see, that in the source directory there are category and category-extra dirs. The dirs without -extra tag contains the basic packages of the given category and the dependencies of the basic packages. So a package in these directories can not depend on a package in extra directories. The same is true for console/graphical applications: if your application/library is graphical, then use xapps/xlib, if not then use apps/lib. For each task there is a default package. For example postfix is our default MTA, so exim, sendmail, etc must be in some extra dir.

The repo has a source and a binary directory. The frugalware repo’s directories are source/ and frugalware-$arch/. The binary packages are in the binary directory of the repo. The sources of packages are a little bit more complex. Each package has a category, and each category and package has its own directory in the source dir.

Let’s see an example. You are searching for the cabextract package. The binary package is named frugalware-<arch>/cabextract-<version>-<release>-<arch>.fpm and its source is placed in the source/apps/cabextract dir.

In the package’s own dir, we store everything required to compile the package. You may say we should store only the patches and so, but in our opinion, it’s very annoying when you want to recompile a package and the original server is slow or even unreachable, due to some other reasons. Also it may be illegal that we would provide only binary packages without storing the source (since then it may be possible that we are not able to send the source to you even if you ask us by mail).

Besides, there is a FrugalBuild file in each package’s source directory. This is a simple bash shell script, that will be included by makepkg. So in the FrugalBuild script you can use everything that can be used in a shell script.

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 once had to use the -R option to build the package in a chroot-ed environment. Since 0.5, building in chroot is the default method, you have to use -H if you want to build on the host system. Chroot requires root privileges. To allow a group (for example the devels group) to use sudo makepkg, start visudo as root, and add the following line:

%devels ALL=NOPASSWD:/usr/bin/makepkg

The chroot will be placed by default in /var/chroot. Only one package can be built in a chroot at a time, so maybe you’ll want to specify a separate chroot for each user. In order to do this, set the $CHROOTDIR variable in your /etc/makepkg.conf from:

export CHROOTDIR="/var/chroot"

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 it took to build the package. Of course, it depends on your hardware, so we use SBUs instead of minutes as a unit.

SBU is the Static Binutils Unit, which means the time repoman merge binutils takes on your machine. By default makepkg will print out how many seconds the build took. After you built binutils, you should update your /etc/makepkg.conf:

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: Miklos Vajna <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 yourself, 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 as the FrugalBuild script. You can use URLs if you want makepkg to download them automatically. It’s important to place all sources in the package’s directory including the source files that you can download from a site. Also when dowloading from sourceforge, please use Finclude sourceforge! If you use various random patches from unknown sources, don’t expect that somebody else will port those patches to a newer version. You will have to do the work yourself. You have been warned! Actually try to avoid patches unless they are really necessary (eg: secfix, bugfix).

A few words about the size of the sources. If you use an URL then the size is almost unlimited, but if the source is not an url then the source will be added to the FST when the package is accepted. We don’t allow files bigger than 100KB in FST. To solve this problem, the sources for a given package are placed in the /pub/other/sources/pkgname dir for each package. If the source is not compressed, we use gzip or bzip2 to compress it first. After this you can use a http://ftp.frugalware.org/pub/other/sources/pkgname/foo-styled URL for those big sources.

sha1sums=(\'094e3afb2fe8dfe82f63731cdcd3b999f4856cff\')

Another bash array to prevent compiling from the wrong source. Of course this is useless if you just run sha1sum foo.tar.gz after download. Try fetching original sha1sums from the projects website, if possible. It’s a good idea to leave a comment above this line about where to find these sha1sums.

As you can see there in no build() function in this FB. It’s because we wrote some F* functions to make our work easier. It’s something similar you can see in Gentoo for example. These functions can be found in source/include/util.sh file inside the FST. An empty build actually means:

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. If the package doesn’t use our $CFLAGS we can’t cross-compile it, so please try to avoid creating "unoptimized" packages. If the package doesn’t contain any architecture-dependent file, then you can add this line manually as makepkg will not detect this.

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 in the depends() array would cause circular dependency.

In the conflicts array, you can define a list of packages that shouldn’t be installed if you want to install this package. Let’s see an another example:

It is necessary as the two packages are almost the same, but the binaries differ. In this case the mutt package must also contain this line: conflicts=(\'mutt-devel\'). Of course, if two or more packages conflict eachother, only one of them can be placed in a non-extra group.

The provides array is used to create virtual dependencies. It means both postfix and sendmail provides mta, so we can do:

The user has a choice between postfix and sendmail.

The last one in this list is the replaces directive. The module-init-tools package is a good example:

As you can see, we often make such new packages which also conflict with each other. Using the replaces directive when users use pacman-g2 -Su next time, if modutils is installed (probably :)), they will be asked to remove modutils and install module-init-tools.

This directive is optional. At the moment, you may add such a field, but copy the LICENSE field from the source root to the packages’s documentation dir, so this isn’t really necessary.

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 following:

repoman merge package

or simply

repoman m package

builds a package from source and installs it. You can configure the build options in the makepkg_opts directive of /etc/repoman.conf.

By default repoman will install the missing dependencies with pacman, clean up the leftover work files, install the package, and write the resulting package to the current working directory.

repoman update

or simply

repoman upd

updates FST in /var/fst (or the directory set in ~/.repoman.conf). First time repoman will download it (it may take some time!).

There are many different ways to contribute to Frugalware. You can write documentation, translate the existing documentation into your native language (or any other language you want to), maintain packages or improve them with added features etc.

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 :)

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

You can also read other mailing lists, 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 security 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:

This ensures that:

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

The name of the official repositories are frugalware-current, frugalware-stable and so on.

The name of WIP repositories are typically in a featureNUM form, like kde45 or parted2, referring to the name of the software it contains and its version. This method is used so that the repository name can be a valid shell variable as well.

Please note that there is a convention that WIP repository names never contain a hyphen (-). This is on purpose. It’s not trivial to decide that when you merge code from one repository to another then build servers should try to build automatically the new packages you brought in or not. Because of this the policy is that if a hyphen is in the name, the it’ll build the new packages (WIP → -current merge), but it won’t do so when you merge the other way around.

Since a repository consists of plain files, we can and should place them on the ftp server (/home/ftp). 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 you will probably do all the work, create it under /pub/other/people/nick/reponame. Simply create a dir, issue git init and push at least one commit to there (but before pushing, enable the hooks, see below).

Now anyone can git clone it, using a full mirror, for example ftp://ftp12.frugalware.org/mirrors/ftp.frugalware.org/pub/.

If the repository is a team one, then create it under /pub/other. In this case you probably 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:

One thing that a hook won’t do for you is to allow pushing to the master branch, even if it’s the checked out one. This is normally not good, but our hook will handle this, so we can ignore the problem:

When you run repoman, it invokes repoman server on the remote machine using ssh. repoman server, just like plain repoman, reads configuration from /etc/repoman.conf and $HOME/.repoman.conf, so you need to set up the later before you can push packages to your WIP repo.

Here is a minimal example:

And then you have to symlink the repos to $HOME/git, for example:

If you create a new WIP repo, syncpkgd won’t sync packages in it by default.

This means that if you just push your commits, no attempt will be made to build the relevant binary package automatically for you, which is the case for the -current / -stable repos.

If you want syncpkgd support, then you need to edit 3 configuration files on the server which runs syncpkgd (that’s typically not your local machine and not the one that runs syncpkgcd).

Edit syncpkgd’s repoman config by extending the repos array and adding the foo_servers, foo_sudo and foo_bases variables:

Add a pacman-g2 configuration file:

The contents will be something like this:

Finally edit the git hook and add foo to the end of the repos array:

If you no longer need these entries, you can remove them, but leave at least one there as an example.

(*) - 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 1.7, the previous release is 1.6.

A testing release is similar to a full one, but much simpler. Here are the steps:

Copy the full tree on genesis:

Now one has two trees. All what one should do in -current is to regenerate ChangeLog.txt (copy & paste the command from tools/genpkgdbs).

Done!

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