Optware homepage: http://www.nslu2-linux.org/wiki/Optware/HomePage
Optware is software package repositories (aka feeds) maintained by NSLU2 project. They offer access to hundreds of precompiled packages with the latest and greatest software, all at your fingertips, just a command and few seconds away!
Using feeds is the recommended way to install and maintain software on your device - this way, you can easily get security and bugfixes, uninstall, and query software database - in other words, get all the service which is core feature of any Linux distribution. Note: it's highly recommended to use only feeds to install the software, and not mix feeds and manual installs from the source. This is the same rule of thumb as for any other Linux distribution. Note2: This may be impractical, as not all software is available in feeds; but at least try to stick to library packages from feeds, if you don't want to create shlib hell for yourself.
For MyBook, the closest feed is 'gumstix1151'.
The main page for the feed is here: http://www.nslu2-linux.org/wiki/Optware/Gumstix. This page does not try to duplicate it, but provide the quick instructions on setting up the feed on MyBook. Please read the original page for more info.
To start using feed, you need first to install package manager. Optware uses ipkg, which is standard package manager for many embedded distributions. Following commands manually bootstrap ipkg from the feed. They must be run as root. If you're logged in as another user, switch to su.
# su
# feed=http://ipkg.nslu2-linux.org/feeds/optware/gumstix1151/cross/unstable
# ipk_name=`wget -qO- $feed/Packages | awk '/^Filename: ipkg-opt/ {print $2}'`
# wget $feed/$ipk_name
# tar -xOvzf $ipk_name ./data.tar.gz | tar -C / -xzvf -
# sed -i -e 's|/stable|/unstable|' /opt/etc/ipkg.conf
There're additional steps required for MyBook, due to uclibc configuration peculiarities:
# echo "/opt/lib" >>/etc/ld.so.conf # ldconfig
Then it's all fun:
Update local feed lists - you need to issue this from time to time to get package updates:
# /opt/bin/ipkg update
See what's available, sort descriptions included:
/opt/bin/ipkg list
See what's already installed:
/opt/bin/ipkg list_installed
Install or upgrade packages:
/opt/bin/ipkg install
This will download packages from the net with all the required dependencies. Note: there's the same command for installing and upgrading to a new version of package.
Again, due to uclibc configuration peculiarities, you may need to run ldconfig after package installation, if it complains that it can't find shared libraries.