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Categories: Tools

Tools and Scripts

This page lists some recommended tools and scripts which help to solve common problems when installing software and maintaining your system.

See also: wanted tools

prt-get

prt-get is a ports and packages management utility which brings convenience to CRUX's native pkgutils, while maintaining backwards compatibility with these tools. prt-get allows things like automatically resolving port locations, installing a package with its dependencies, and executing pre and post install scripts for complex packages. prt-get also provides a single command for issuing a system update. For a complete list of features, have a look at the prt-get users manual or the prt-get quick start document.

yapo

yapo is a small ncurses application which lists a CRUX ports tree in a comprehensive, scrolling view. It is built atop the prt-get utility, and therefore prt-get's most important features are available within yapo. Have a look at yapo's homepage to learn more about it.

prt-utils

prt-utils is a collection of handy scripts for CRUX packages and ports. Many of them aim to help out with broken systems or corrupt package databases. Most of the scripts come with man(1) pages, but not all of them. Please use the CRUX ports repository to install prt-utils, and feel free to contact us with contributions for this package. A more detailed description is available at the prt-utils project page.

httpup

httpup provides one-way synchronization for file repositories over the http protocol. It has been implemented as a driver for the ports(8) system, and so it is often used to distribute ports trees where a CVS server is not available or uneccessary. In fact, the CRUX ports database indexes several httpup repositories. To learn more, visit the httpup project page.

ck4up

ck4up is a command-line utility primarily intended for CRUX ports maintainers to watch project pages for updates and releases, but may also be useful to others. ck4up fetches a list of Urls from the web, computes the md5sum of the page, and alerts the user if a page has changed. See the ck4up homepage for more information.

pkgsync

pkgsync is a package management utility that allows a sysadmin to maintain software installations across any number of CRUX Linux PCs. pkgsync accesses a repository of binary packages maintained on a "master" host. pkgsync works natively with NFS or local filesystems, and is most useful in an office environment. It also plays nicely with prt-get. Read more about pkgsync here.

pkg-get

pkg-get is intended to be the equivalent of prt-get, but for binary packages. The basic concept is that a local or remote (http, ftp) machine provides a set of binary packages and several support files. Client machines can fetch and install binaries, dependency info and other metadata from the server. Read more about pkg-get here.

pkgsync vs pkg-get

In general, pkg-get and pkgsync are very similar. pkgsync is ideal if you are already running NFS, and have many nodes. pkg-get, on the other hand, is superior in more distributed environments. Both are actively maintained, and may work interchangeably in the future.