Upgrading to ffp 0.5

Since I'm in the mood to upgrade, I figured I might as well upgrade fonz's fun_plug to version 0.5. This can be considered a major upgrade as there are quite a few fundamental changes such as the directory structure, default shell and the default packages included. This means that all the addon packages you installed (or built) based on the older 0.4 version or below need to be reinstalled and/or reconfigured.

The upgrade from 0.4 to 0.5 is painless enough using the instructions found here. After the install, get rid of telnet and get ssh back up (note that the default ssh included is openssh, not dropbear). Instructions for this is here.

A couple of things to note:

First up, the new path to the fun_plug is now at /mnt/HD_a2/ffp. A symlink at /ffp allows you to move the binaries to say a USB flash to reduce disk access and also to allow a clean shutdown of the HD_a2 file system.

Next the default env variables such as BINDIR, FUNPLUGDIR are all gone. So if you have any scripts that reference them, you will need to get them changed (e.g. svnserve.sh and my nightly backup script)

The default installed packages can be found under /ffp/var/packages. Additional packages can be downloaded from here. To install them, follow the instructions here. (Note: substitute -u with -i for install and -r for remove).

Unrar will need to be installed again using this package.

mldonkey is not yet packaged for this version but moving it from the old is real easy; Just copy the file mlnet from /mnt/HD_a2/fun_plug.d/bin to /ffp/bin, copy the file mlnet.sh from /mnt/HD_a2/fun_plug.d/start to /ffp/start and edit it for the path changes.

Well, that about sums up my experience with this upgrade. Now to try out the various packages that are built for this version!