December 12, 2013

Using opkg

The program "opkg" is the package manager for angstrom linux on the Beagle Bone Black. It fits into the same ecological niche as the "yum" package manager on fedora, which I know and use. The above link provides excellent documentation, but you should ignore the comments specific to opkg on openWRT.

opkg update

This pulls down up to date package lists. It does not update any packages. Many people issue this command prior to any list or install command.

opkg list

This lists all available packages. The list is dependent on the package list which is not automatically maintained, so you should do an opkg update prior to this. For example I did not find "ruby" in the list on my BBB as it was shipped to me, but this was some ancient list placed on my BBB before it shipped. After doing opkg update, lo and behold there it was!

opkg install ruby

This installs the ruby package (version 1.9.3-p194-r1.0.1) at the time of this writing.
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Tom's Computer Info / tom@mmto.org