man pages

[DoubleDash]

I like man pages ....being a linux nube et al


Of course because of the space they occupy not having them in the nand was necessary.


Just wondering if it is possible to get them installed somehow into an OS booting from SD card, or are they closely integrated into the kernel?


I did a quick angstrom package browse for 'man' but did not find anything......


Also wondered if the man pages system in general uses any of the C compression libraries.

 

[Eridger]

Man is absolutely needed. I was pretty disappointed to learn it isn't installed by default.

 

[gruso]

A good man is hard to find, it's no laughing matter.

 

[Gerix]

A good man is hard to find, it's no laughing matter.

You could always try

locate man

I thought the man pages were going to be bundled somehow, but I haven't payed much attention since I haven't received my unit yet.

 

[WizardStan]

opkg install man


and then some script which takes the contents of "opkg list-installed", appends "-doc" to the end of it, and then "opkg install"s each of those would do the job.


Something like

opkg list-installed | sed 's/\([^ ]*\).*/\1-doc/' | xargs opkg install

A lot of the packages it tries to install won't have any documentation, but that's fine, it should just ignore them

 

[DoubleDash]

opkg install man


and then some script which takes the contents of "opkg list-installed", appends "-doc" to the end of it, and then "opkg install"s each of those would do the job.


Something like

opkg list-installed | sed 's/\([^ ]*\).*/\1-doc/' | xargs opkg install

A lot of the packages it tries to install won't have any documentation, but that's fine, it should just ignore them

Thanks WizardStan, informative as always.


Hopefully if I can get this working I can have a man on my SD card

 

[gruso]

I wonder what kind of space we'd be talking? Obviously they were left off the NAND for that reason.

 

[DoubleDash]

I wonder what kind of space we'd be talking? Obviously they were left off the NAND for that reason.

Yeahh, me too, hence my question about the compression libraries...I wonder if man pages were actually built using some sort of compression in mind, although I doubt it?

 

[cosam]

I have a fairly bare server here, man pages weigh in around 50MB. I would guess a freshly-installed Pandora would have less than that. They're usually gzip compressed and, being text, they compress pretty well.

 

[Letalis Sonus]

Yeahh, me too, hence my question about the compression libraries...I wonder if man pages were actually built using some sort of compression in mind, although I doubt it?

Manpages are GZIP compressed. It doesn't matter, though, the filesystem itself should compress everything via zlib already. If you take a look at the size of the rootfs (extracted tarball) it is larger than the available 512MiB.

 

[WizardStan]

Manpages are GZIP compressed. It doesn't matter, though, the filesystem itself should compress everything via zlib already. If you take a look at the size of the rootfs (extracted tarball) it is larger than the available 512MiB.

Yeah, the rootfs on the NAND is compressed, which means when the compressed man pages take up 30MB of space, it's 30MB of actually space, since you can't compress twice.

 

[DoubleDash]

Just an idea....not even sure if it is possible.


How about a pnd application which replaced entirely the functionality/information provided by 'man'?

 

[aranson]

opkg install man


and then some script which takes the contents of "opkg list-installed", appends "-doc" to the end of it, and then "opkg install"s each of those would do the job.


Something like

opkg list-installed | sed 's/\([^ ]*\).*/\1-doc/' | xargs opkg install

A lot of the packages it tries to install won't have any documentation, but that's fine, it should just ignore them

I tried opkg install man, and it spit back an error at me, saying it couldn't install man.


when I get home, I'll edit exactly what the error message was and/or the - V 2 output.

 

[WizardStan]

You need to "opkg update" first. And the whole thing needs to be run as super user, so "sudo su" before running these.

 

[gruso]

We're applying the standard disclaimer here, right? Use of opkg can fill your NAND and/or break your OS, requiring a reflash. It is not supported by OPT. You're in bat country now. You should not really use it unless you're running your OS from SD.

 

[WizardStan]

Of course. My suggestion was borne entirely on the idea that this was an SD based install. I probably should have mentioned that.


It's about 30MB of pre-compressed data: it will probably do more to fill your NAND than any other package you may wish to install, so be very very cautious.

 

[aranson]

We're applying the standard disclaimer here, right? Use of opkg can fill your NAND and/or break your OS, requiring a reflash. It is not supported by OPT. You're in bat country now. You should not really use it unless you're running your OS from SD.

Ah, I should have said. Running Hotfix 5 RC2 from an ext2 SD card.


a "$sudo opkg install -V 2 man" yields


.


.


opkg_conf_parse_file: Loading conf file /etc/opkg/python-feed.conf.


pkg_hash_load_feeds:


pkg_hash_load_status_files:


pkg_info_preinstall_check: Updating file owner list.


opkg_configure_packages: Configuring unpacked packages.


opkg_configure_packages: Reordering packages before configuring them...


Collected errors:


* opkg_install_cmd: Cannot install package man.


and that's what it gives me.

 

[Mash]

* opkg_install_cmd: Cannot install package man.

Indeed, that's a weird thing. On the Angstrom-Website, you can search for "man" and will see "man", "man-doc" and "man-dev". But installing them directly from the Angstrom-Repo fails, because it seems not to find the files.


If you really want to do it, here's how (i'm not responsible if you hose your system, tested only on HF5 RC2):


-- WARNING: DO THIS ONLY ON A PANDORA RUNNING SYSTEM-OS OFF SD-CARD! --


Step 1) from Angstrom-Repo, manually download


man


groff


to your Pandora.


Step 2) as root (or do it with "sudo"), enter the following commands (order DOES matter!):

opkg -V 2 update

opkg -V 2 install /path/to/your/downloads/groff_1.19.2-r4_armv7a.ipk

opkg -V 2 install /path/to/your/downloads/man_1.5p-r3_armv7a.ipk

I use "-V 2" as an option to opkg to see what it's actually doing, you can omit this. Now we have "man", "whatis" and "apropos".


BUT: we have no man-pages! Looking into "/usr/share/man/man1/", i can see TWO lonely man-pages. So...


Step 3) ...you have to copy over the man-pages you need from another Linux-System. I've copied them from my Debian-Squeeze-Desktop-machine, and they work on the pandora!

HTH!

 

[WizardStan]

Step 3) ...you have to copy over the man-pages you need from another Linux-System. I've copied them from my Debian-Squeeze-Desktop-machine, and they work on the pandora!

sudo su

opkg list-installed | sed 's/\([^ ]*\).*/\1-doc/' | xargs opkg install

will also install documentation (ie, man pages) for all installed packages.


Very strange that it won't install man though.

 

[DoubleDash]

@mash


Thanks, I like the ipk download method.


This way I can add it to the development toolchain ipk's I have, so when a new OS build comes along I can quicky batch rebuild the SD card dev environment, even without internet access. It is also much quicker, and more certain to work.