Simple and boring: How to install basic *nix utilities

[Calum]

hello,
i am planning as you know to put basiclinux 1.7 on my new (old) computer. it is a very slimmed down version of slackware 3.5. It is so slim that many utilities seem to not be there. missing so far, seem to be useradd or adduser and netstat. no doubt i will discover many other utils that i don't have too, the likes of make or others.

What i want to know is, can i install these afterwards? (of course i can, but how?) and how would i go about it.

I will be discovering little things i need installed for a while i think so what's the best way to go about finding the util and then installing it? should i search the slackware public download directories? or can i use BSD sources? or what is best? is it bad to get BSD versions of things since some programs or utilities will expect GNU versions, or vice versa?

i did a search for installing slackware netstat on google, but it was no help since all the pages were ones where i was being told to install something else, and run netstat. most people assume you have all these utils installed already since i assume a normal slackware install would include them all. what i want to know is how to literally put those things on there myself.

There's a third floppy's worth of install disk for basiclinux though, meaning that as i am currently running it from the two floppy version, maybe the third install disk adds certain utils (like netstat or adduser) when i finally put it on the hard drive, if you get what i mean.

Anyway, any help would be appreciated. i am not asking for specifics, although they would of course be welcome, i'm just asking for a kind of rule of thumb way to install basic missing components.

oddly, it seems that ipfwadm, netsetup and pppsetup are all included with basiclinux even though adduser and netstat (and no doubt a lot of others) are not!

edit - oh yeah, and i bet passwd isn't included either, and i need that for sure!

[ November 21, 2002: Message edited by: Calum: Linux Commando ]

[Calum]

update:
well! i just looked through what's in the 700kB bas2hd file, and it does include passwd! it also appears to have a huge range of other stuff, including login, chown, chgrp, top and pico! (how this and a hundred or so other utils fits into 700k is beyond me!), also included is a generic XF86Config file, and other things that hint that it expects X11 to be installed at some point.
I didn't see any useradd though, but i assume it must be there what with all the other user related stuff.
Nevertheless, i'm still interested in finding out how to install individual stuff on this basic system as i didn't see a whiff of netstat either...

[pkd_lives]

I don't know if you have found this yet.

BasicLinux FAQ

and it includes these two snippets.

   

quote:
 > Is there a command line list for BasicLinux somewhere?

agetty badblocks basename bash brc busybox cat
chattr chgrp chmod chown chroot clear compress cp
cut date dd df dirname dmesg dos2unix du e2fsck e3
emailSMTP expr eznet false fdisk fetchmail file
find free fsck ftp gpm grep gunzip gzip halt head head hostname ifconfig init insmod ipfwadm killall
killall5 ldconfig ldd less lesspipe.sh links-0.90 ln loadkmap login ls lsmod mail man mkdir mke2fs
mklost+found mknod mkswap more mount mount mouse
mouse mv nc passwd pico pidof ping pkg ppp-off
ppp-on pppd pppsetup ps rdev reboot receive reset
rm rmdir rmmod route scan sed sed send setkeycodes
setleds setserial sh shutdown slattach sleep sort
stty swapoff swapon sync syslogd tail tar telnet
top touch tput tr true umount uname untar update
uudecode vimage wc wp writemail zcat zless

Plus the BASH built-in commands (type 'help' to see these).

@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@

> How do I add a new username to the system?

There are several different ways to add a new user.
You can edit /etc/passwd by hand, or you can install useradd from Slackware 3.5, or you can use the following script contributed by Sebastian Ertz ([email protected]).

#!/bin/bash
echo -n "Username: "
read USER
echo "$USER::100:100::/home/$USER:/bin/bash" >> /etc/passwd
mkdir -p /home/$USER
chown $USER:users /home/$USER

Hope this may shed light, and if not I hope it's not information you have already read through.

Edit : bloody formatting don't you know.

[ November 21, 2002: Message edited by: pkd : Linux Frank ]

[Calum]

this is good stuff! i do recall this 43k file amongst all the BasicLinux downloads i did the other day, hang on and i'll print it out to read on the tube home tonight! thanks for pointing me to it!
maybe i will make my own little script called useradd, i can see myself making a lot of little symlinks and so on, just to accomodate my own style of working, or is it better to force myself to learn how basiclinux likes to be set up rather than the other way round?

once more thank you for finding that!

edit - from reading through this faq i am heartened. it is written for DOS users new to linux, so i feel that little is left to the imagination, or to chance.

[ November 21, 2002: Message edited by: Calum: Linux Commando ]