Installing WWIV on Linux


Prerequisites

Critical Items

These are items that are needed for proper functionality. NOTE The installer will halt and ask you to address these if they are not found

Package Comments
sudo to allow more controlled access to root-owned tools
zip/unzip needed for system setup, and really any BBS should have it
ncurses (libncurses5) Needed for CLI tools GUI display (libncurses5 is the debian version)
awk, grep, sed core OS tools for line parsing (these are really basic)

Optional Items

These are items that are not needed for proper functionality of a basic BBS, but will make things a lot easier (and potentially necessary for certain advanced configurations).

NOTE The installer will warn you about these, but will continue.

Package Comments
dosemu to run dos
dos2unix/unix2dos for converting file types

Steps to install the precompiled binaries

These are the steps for using the precompiled binaries. These are the recommended ones to use if you have a debian-based system (eg, debian 9, ubuntu, etc).

DO NOT RUN WWIV AS ROOT. You are just asking to get screwed if you do. The root account is the linux equivalent of SYSOP. Also, don't run WWIV as your own user. Anything your user can do, the BBS can do. The best option is to create a dedicated user to run the BBS.

Luckily, we have an installer script that will take care of most of the details for you.

  1. Make a wwiv directory and cd into it (e.g., /home/wwiv)
  2. Download the latest wwiv-linux-release.tar.gz to your wwiv directory
    WWIV 5.3 Development
  3. Extract wwiv-linux-release.tar.gz into your wwiv directory ( e.g, tar zxvf wwiv-linux-release.tar.gz)
  4. Run sudo ./install.sh and follow the prompts. You must run this as root becasue it takes care of all the setup items for you: creating the WWIV user, setting up sudo access for a standard user, installing the systemd service file, etc.
  5. log into the new wwiv user (e.g, sudo su - wwiv -s /bin/bash) and run ./wwivconfig to configure the BBS

If you have any issues, check the install_date_time.log file that was created during the install.
If you still can't tell what happened, come and find us in IRC.

Steps to install Manually Compiled binaries

Compile things you will need

If you are going to be compiling your own BBS binaries, these are a must-have

Package Comments
git to grab the source code for compiling
ncurses-devel (libncurses5-dev) development headers, etc. (libncurses5-dev is the debian version)
cmake used to control the software compilation process
make runs the compile steps
g++ 6.3 or later the actual compiler tool

All the steps for installing manually compiled biniaries are the same as the prebuilt

  1. Make a wwiv directory and cd into it (e.g., /home/wwiv)
  2. Download the latest wwiv-linux-release.tar.gz to your wwiv directory
    WWIV 5.3 Development
  3. Extract wwiv-linux-release.tar.gz into your wwiv directory ( e.g, tar zxvf wwiv-linux-release.tar.gz)

This is where things differ (we need to replace the prebuilt binaries with our new ones)

pull down the code from git (https://github.com/wwivbbs/wwiv.git) Navigate to your source directory (e.g., /home/wwiv/wwiv-master)
The first time you compile, you need to precompile cryptlib: pushd deps/cl342; make -j8; popd > /dev/null

Also if you haven't created a build-tree for cmake. In this documentation, we'll assume that the build tree will be in a _build sbubdirectory of the git repository root. You must do this too once. You can create this with the following command:

mkdir _build

Now that you have the prerequisites compiled, it's time to compile WWIV itself.
run the following: pushd _build; cmake .. && cmake --build . -- -j8; popd>/dev/null (don't forget the ".")

assuming you built in /home/wwiv/wwiv-master, the binaries you will have as a result are:

/home/wwiv/wwiv-master/_build/bbs/bbs  
/home/wwiv/wwiv-master/_build/wwivconfig/wwivconfig  
/home/wwiv/wwiv-master/_build/wwivd/wwivd
/home/wwiv/wwiv-master/_build/network/network
/home/wwiv/wwiv-master/_build/network1/network1
/home/wwiv/wwiv-master/_build/network2/network2
/home/wwiv/wwiv-master/_build/network3/network3
/home/wwiv/wwiv-master/_build/networkb/networkb  
/home/wwiv/wwiv-master/_build/networkc/networkc  
/home/wwiv/wwiv-master/_build/networkf/networkf  
/home/wwiv/wwiv-master/_build/wwivd/wwivd  
/home/wwiv/wwiv-master/_build/wwivutil/wwivutil  

These should all be placed in your WWIV base directory. For example, if your WWIV base is /home/wwiv and your cmake build tree is /home/wwiv/wwiv-master/_build, the following will copy all the compiled binaries to your base wwiv directory

cd /home/wwiv/wwiv-master/_build
cp -v bbs/bbs \
      wwivconfig/wwivconfig \
      wwivd/wwivd \
      network/network \
      network1/network1 \
      network2/network2 \
      network3/network3 \
      networkb/networkb \
      networkc/networkc \
      networkf/networkf \
      wwivd/wwivd \
      wwivutil/wwivutil \
   /home/wwiv/

Now that we have the new binaries in place, we can pick up where we left off...

  1. Run sudo ./install.sh and follow the prompts. You must run this as root becasue it takes care of all the setup items for you: creating the WWIV user, setting up sudo access for a standard user, installing the systemd service file, etc.
  2. Log into the new wwiv user (e.g, sudo su - wwiv -s /bin/bash) and run ./wwivconfig to configure the BBS

After the install

If you've gotten this far, Your BBS should be up and running. Everything below this point is details about more in-depth configuration (DOORs, WWIVnet, etc) and some of the current warts that linux has that you need to be aware of. If you come across anything that is not detailed here, please let us know.

Customization

In addition to the settings configured using wwivconfig, there are also several INI files that manage details about your install. The main ones are:

  1. wwiv.ini - the primary config file. Most of your settings are here
  2. net.ini - manages details for how to connect to wwivnet for message transfers

dosemu config

dosemu is used for a number of things that can't be handled natively in linux (ie, DOS binaries). Here are some config details:

Configuring WWIVnet

See WWIVnet Config on Linux for details on configuring WWIVnet and subscribing to subs

TERM settings

The Curses library being used for wwivconfig gets confused on some terminal settings, and results in a borked display on exit. You may have to type a "reset" command to get it to behave normally again. In general, it appears that using a TERM setting in the xterm family works best (xterm, xterm-color, etc).