IPKG (en)

- in Deutsch

- in English

IPKG is a very lightweight package management system. It was designed for Linux installations with severe storage limitations such as handheld computers. iPKG is more than just an embedded Linux flash image builder, (although it does that fairly well). It also allows for dynamic installation/removal of packages on a running system.

iPKG is itsy in several ways:

• The control programs themselves are small,
• The installed meta-data tries to be only what is absolutely essential,
• The available packages are small. The idea is that the package tree should be as fine-grain as possible.

Packages have the extension .ipk. iPKG package format is based on Debian's package format .deb, with as result that it is easy to convert existing Debian packages to iPKG.

Since OE 1.6 the IPKG package management was replaced by OPKG (Open PacKaGe). The command ipkg must be replaced with opkg.

Installing

To install a IPKG-package follow the steps below:

• Copy the package (e.g. enigma2-plugin-movietagger_1.1-20061213- r0_mipsel.ipk) to the Dreambox into the directory /tmp with the help of FTP etc.
• Login to the Dreambox's console with telnet.
• Use ipkg install /tmp/enigma2-plugin-movietagger_1.1-20061213-r0_mipsel.ipk to install the package. You should see something like:

root@dm7025:~> ipkg install /tmp/enigma2-plugin-movietagger_1.1-20061213-r0_mipsel.ipk
Installing enigma2-plugin-movietagger (1.1-20061213-r0) to root...
Configuring enigma2-plugin-movietagger
root@dm7025:~>

• The package is now installed and can be used.

Removing

A IPKG-package can be removed using the package name (e.g. enigma2-plugins-movietagger).

root@dm7025:~> ipkg remove enigma2-plugin-movietagger
Removing package enigma2-plugin-movietagger from root...
root@dm7025:~>

Erstellen eines IPKG-Pakets

Eine gute Anleitung, wie man selber IPKG-Pakete erstellt, findet man im DreamboxWIKI.

Zu beachten ist, dass man in die CONTROL-Datei die richtige Architektur einträgt. Die kommt auf den Inhalt des Paketes an. Wenn es nur Textdateien (z.B. .py) oder Bilder enthält, sollte man die Architektur "all" auswählen. Wenn es Binärprogramme enthält, sollte man die entsprechende Architektur auswählen (z.B. "powerpc" oder "mipsel").

Welche Architekturen zu der eigenen Box passen kann man über den Befehl ipkg print_architecture herausfinden. Das wäre bei einer DM600 PVR zum Beispiel: root@dm600pvr:~# ipkg print_architecture arch all 1 arch powerpc 6 arch dm600pvr 11 root@dm600pvr:~#