Custom Linux Environment - Part 03 - A Livable System

A Livable System

A livable system is, by definition, one that you're happy using on a frequent basis. Essentially, it means you have quite a few things on it that you can or do use on a day to day basis. There's a number of these for me, but perhaps the most important is...

Joe

I like coffee. I like Joe. Joe is Joe's Own Editor. (Again, us strange people with the recursive acronyms!) You can get it from joe's own site.

I configured mine with --prefix=/usr --sysconfdir=/etc. It links to ncurses for terminal definitions if it's there, and that's a good thing. Terminal definitions mean we don't see problems. Once it compiles, there's not really a check suite, so go ahead and make DESTDIR=foo install.

You should have an etc/joe/lots of joe/jstar/etc rc files. Move them all to names like joerc.new, then from your base dir (Mine was /tmp/joe ), mkdir install; cd install; joe doinst.sh and add a line for each one that goes something like

( if ! [ -e /etc/joe/joerc ]; then cp /etc/joe/joerc.new /etc/joe/joerc; fi; )

This will create a script that's run when the package is installed to move /etc/joe/joerc.new to /etc/joe/joerc if /etc/joe/joerc does not already exist. In other words, wouldn't you hate it if you overwrote a really customized config file on installation by mistake? I've done it. Nothing like losing hours of work on a written from scratch httpd.conf. Makes me crave coffee again just thinking about it. Muaha.

screen

Screen is one of the most useful utilities I know. Imagine being able to switch between remote terminals on the same screen - Priceless, right? That's what screen does. I fed it --prefix=/usr --sysconfdir=/etc again, since it has a screenrc file. Same information about doinst.sh above applies, only figure out which file to do it with yourself. :)

Finish packaging and install.

pkg-config

It's available from freedesktop.org over here. Snag it - It allows programs to reference .pc files - You've seen them occasionally getting installed to /usr/lib/pkgconfig/name-version.pc.

Basically, it lets program A execute a simple command and get the flags it needs to add for a specific lib, search paths, and installed version in an easy-to-parse format. One of those little tools in the background you'll probably never think about.

You might, however, want to edit /etc/profile at this point, and add a variable called PKG_CONFIG_DIR=/usr/lib/pkgconfig;/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig; or somesuch. Because that's how it knows where to look.

zlib

zlib is " A Massively Spiffy Yet Delicately Unobtrusive Compression Library (Also Free, Not to Mention Unencumbered by Patents) ". It is indeed spiffy. It's a fast compressed I/O library, in effect, and very useful for things wanting to save drive space.

Get it from here.

It's pretty simple to configure --prefix=/usr --shared, and we've used over a third of its configure options already!

Package and install it like normal.

readline

Readline is one of those old cranky packages you will run into sometimes. It has been around forever, and there's a couple of things you have to do to make it install right. However, I'm going to take a time out and mention the most important:

When compiling readline as a shared library, you have to set the library to pull in ncurses. It doesn't know about ncurses, it's just going to look around for lcurses, not find it, and not link to any cursor library. You have to specify SHLIB_LIBS=-lncurses on the make line for it to link properly. If it doesn't, our next package won't be very happy with it.

When I configured it, I passed it --prefix=/usr --enable-shared --with-curses --infodir=/usr/info --mandir=/usr/man.

Don't forget to apply all of it's patches before you make SHLIB_LIBS=-lncurses; It's a Gnu program.

pcre

Pcre is touchy, just because we're running on a 64MB environment. Essentially, what it comes down to, is that configure doesn't catch all of our CFLAGS and CXXFLAGS quite like it should.

I tossed the flags --enable-pcregrep-libz --enable-pcregrep-libbz2 --enable-pcregrep-libreadline --enable-utf8 --enable-unicode-properties at it.

The cflags I'm using are still --march=native -mmmx -msse -msse2 -Os -maccumulate-outgoing-args. You'll need to use joe on your makefile, while drinking joe. Bwahaha.

Make check it. Some of the tests may fail with an errno 12, that's an unable to allocate memory error. Ignore it.

glib

Alright. Now it's time for glib. A couple points to note - glib needs to have its tests run while !root, because some of its test suite is file access and directory access. When root, you automagically have access to all files and directories no matter what the permissions on them are set to. This means that there's nothing anyone can do to block you out, but for a test that tests the effectiveness of setting permissions that means that the tests come back as if they were all broken. As you can imagine, this breaks the test suite. I compiled glib in /usr/local/src as a non-root user.

Toss its configure --prefix=/usr --with-pcre=internal (Saves on memory usage once it's loaded.) --prefix=/usr.

Make it. It should make allright if you're using -Os in your CFLAGS.

When you make check, though, you're going to see some tests fail because of memory allocation errors, out of memory, or errno12. These are all directly related to only having 64MB of RAM and no swap - You'll have to disregard these. Once check works flawlessly except for problems caused by a lack of RAM, go ahead and package and install it.

OpenSSL

OpenSSL, as far as most people are concerned, seems to be THE SSL LIBRARY. However, there is another one - GNU TLS.

Why does Gnu TLS warrant mention?

Because it has support for RFC5246, also known as TLS 1.2. TLS does what SSL used to. RFC5246 is what is known as a "proposed standard". The only thing that keeps it from becoming a "standard" is that it has not yet achieved widespread usage. Many RFC's remain both "the way this is done" and a "proposed standard" - RFC's are a very interesting thing. In general, if you want to know how something (such as a protocol) works, hit up the Internet Engineering TaskForce page and read the RFC's on your subject of choice.

If you want to install gnuTLS, go for it. You'll need libgpg-error and libgcrypt, both from the GnuPG site. However, something that ought to be mentioned here:

While apache does have a mod_gnutls available at outoforder.cc, it does not yet list support for TLS 1.2. In fact, TLS 1.2 is very new from a standards point of view, so don't expect much to use it. I will continue to use OpenSSL in general, and will include specific information about GnuTLS support if we compile anything which actually supports it the way we want it to. GnuTLS is pretty easy to compile. However, as of yet, almost nothing has support for GnuTLS.

OpenSSL, on the other hand, you want to ./config it. I used this:

 ./config threads shared zlib-dynamic --prefix=/usr --openssldir=/etc/ssl

Then make it, and then:

 make INSTALL_PREFIX=/tmp/opennsl 

Or so. You'll need to move your man directory from etc/ssl/man to usr/man.

Now, we've got a lot of man pages.

I really prefer to bzip2 -9 my man pages.

But we have a TON of symbolic links. In fact, in man1, probably more links then man files! So, we're not going to do this by hand.

So here is a very touchy script. Use it in the usr/man dir, and it will sort through man1 man2 man3 etc., erase all the links, then recreate all the links to point at $original_file.bz2, then compress everything.

It works, but it DOES spit out a lotta error messages. In the end, it does compress everything though. Like I said, it's TOUCHY. Don't blame me if it breaks, debug it and send it back.

USE AT YOUR OWN RISK. I spent probably an hour making this already, drinking joe in joe.

function compman()
{
for dirname in `echo man{1,2,3,4,5,6,7}`; do
        if [ -d $dirname ]; then
                cd $dirname;
                find . | while read filename; do
                        if [ -L $filename ]; then
                                export file1=`ls -l $filename | cut -f 2- -d "/" | cut -f 1 -d "-" | cut -f 1 -d " "`;
                                export file2=`ls -l $filename | cut -f 2- -d ">"`;
                                ( rm -rf $file1 )
                                ( ln -sf $file2.bz2 $file1.bz2 )
                                unset file1;
                                unset file2;
                        fi;
                done;
                ( bzip2 -9 * )
                echo "Finished in $dirname."
                cd ..
        fi;
done;
}

Once you're ready, package and install. You have a brand new openssl. Mine has bz2'd man files without broken symlinks. Cool.

I now have openssl-0.9.8i-i686-7.tgz, because one way or another I kept not following my own instructions. Phew!

irssi

Irssi is my favorite irc client. It's small, fairly lean, extensively featured, and console based. You can get it from their web site. Go snag it.

Building it is very straightforward, after all the strangeness we've had to endure. I tossed --sysconfdir=/etc --prefix=/usr --with-perl --with-ncurses --with-gnu-ld --with-perl-lib=/usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.10.0/Slackware-linux/ --enable-ssl --mandir=/usr/man, you'll have to fill the --with-perl-lib in for your own system. Make, and make DESTDIR=/foo install, package it up and install it for real.

If you're like me, about this time you start adding --infodir=/usr/info --mandir=/usr/man --sysconfdir=/etc --prefix=/usr into your ~/.bashrc - Which will be sourced any time you start bash, initial login or not - just because you're tired of typing them all the time. This means confy function will now look like this:

function confy
{
if ./configure --prefix=/usr --infodir=/usr/info --mandir=/usr/man --sysconfdir=/etc $* > configurate.txt 2>&1;
   then echo "configure --prefix=/usr --infodir=/usr/info --mandir=/usr/man --sysconfdir=/etc $* successful.";
   else echo "failure configuring $*."; 
        tail -n 20 configurate.txt;
fi;
}

Which means all you'd have to type in would be:

confy --with-perl --with-ncurses --with-gnu-ld --with-perl-lib=/usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.10.0/Slackware-linux/ --enable-ssl

But the output you'd get would be something like this:

configure --prefix=/usr --infodir=/usr/info --mandir=/usr/man --sysconfdir=/etc --with-perl --with-ncurses --with-gnu-ld --with-perl-lib=/usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.10.0/Slackware-linux/ --enable-ssl successful.

make DESTDIR=/tmp/irssi install

( if ! [ -e /etc/irssi.conf ]; then cp /etc/irssi.conf.new /etc/irssi.conf; fi; )

cd /usr && find . | while read filename; do if [ -x $filename ]; then if ldd $filename 2>&1 | grep expat > /dev/null 2>&1; then echo $filename depends on expat; fi; fi; done;

 confy --disable-gtkui --disable-screensaver --disable-sm --disable-gtkspell --disable-gestures --disable-gstreamer --disable-meanwhile --disable-avahi --dsable-dbus --disable-tk 

cd / && find . | wc -l

The things that amuse me.