Optional Software Packages - Getting started

From ReelBox Maniacs

Your ReelBox comes along with a package manager, which lets you install and maintain optional software easily. There are not many packages available as of this writing, but some nice guys started to explore the dos and don'ts of ipkg and at the end came up with the first optional software packages for the ReelBox. As the community grows, there will be more packages available for sure.

Build for small computer devices, the philosophy of the package manager is to build packages as small as possible. So you will find packages like at, libgd or noadaddon.

There are also some meta packages telling your ReelBox package manager to install several small packages. As an example you may find libphp5 which will install several small packages it depends on. After installing libphp5, a fully featured apache web server with php5 support will be ready to be used on your ReelBox.

ipkg comes with commands to get/update lists of packages available from several sources, install, update and remove packages. It is not able to handle updates of your basic software image. And it also is somewhat helpless, after installation of new image possibly. You might compare the procedure to a hard reset of a PDA/PPC: there is a good chance, that you have to reinstall your optional software packages afterwards.

As of this writing, you have to run the package manager via command line. There is no OSD interface. We are confident of this to be changed in near future, if there are enough requests from all these friendly ReelBox users. So please place your request on the German RMM board (international section) or the UK board.