Frugalware 1.0pre1-2032-gc8b72b3 (-current) 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: