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.

  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. Here are some links:

  3. 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
  4. 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.

  5. 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:

  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).