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 |
Installation Steps
These are the steps for installing WWIV. You should do this step to setup a base system, even if you plan on compiling the binaries from source to use.
DO NOT RUN WWIV AS ROOT. This will cause many problems, please run it
as a user account, and ideally a UNIX account that is not used by any
user for interactive use. The standard install name is wwiv
with
a group of wwiv
and without the ability to login on it's own. This
means that you login as a normal user, then use su
or sudo
to
execute commands as the wwiv user.
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.
-
Make a wwiv directory and cd into it (e.g., /home/wwiv)
-
Download the latest wwiv-linux-release.tar.gz to your wwiv directory. Here are some links:
- Extract wwiv-????.tar.gz into your wwiv directory.
(please note that the filename will be different)
tar zxvf wwiv-linux-debian10-5.5.0-1234.tar.gz
-
If you plan on using binaries you compiled yourself, please follow the instructions on the WWIV readme.md file on GitHub and then return here before running the next step.
-
From the wwiv directory (i.e. /home/wwiv), run
sudo ./install.sh
and follow the prompts.
There are many options available for install.sh,
please run sudo ./install.sh --help
for the full list of options.
By default the script expects the username and groupname to both be
wwiv
and not yet exist.
You must run this as root. The script performs the following tasks for you:
- creating the WWIV user and group
- setting up sudo access for a standard user
- installing the systemd service file.
Now, you may log into the new wwiv user (e.g, sudo -u wwiv -s)
and run ./wwivconfig
to configure the BBS.
(If that first sudo command doesn't work on your system, try
sudo su - wwiv -s /bin/bash
)
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 or post a message in one of the wwiv support subs.
Steps to install Manually Compiled binaries
Please follow the instructions on the WWIV readme.md file on GitHub after you installed the base system as described above (making sure to have completed all of the steps.)
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:
- wwiv.ini - the primary config file. Most of your settings are here
- 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:
- dosemu common settings - general settings for dosemu
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).