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2.3.1 Installation Procedure

See Installing MsgEd TE as part of the Husky Project Tools, if you want to use MsgEd TE in conjunction with the hpt Tosser and other Husky Project tools.

The rest of this subsection only covers manual installation of MsgEd TE as a standalone message reader, and may be skipped if you are using MsgEd TE in a Husky environemnt.

If you are using Linux you can get the Linux distribution archive which contains a pre-compiled binary. If you are running any other Unix (including FreeBSD, which due to a strange problem in the termios code won’t run the Linux binaries properly) you have to compile the source code on your own (which usually is not much of a problem). See Compiling the Soruce Code, for more information on this.

Please note that this manual does not necessarily cover installation of the RPM archives of Msged created by other persons. Some tips of the following sections also apply when you install the RPM files, but others don’t Please refer to the documentation of those RPM archives for more information.

The following describes the installation of the files from the Linux distribution archive. If you have compiled MsgEd TE yourself, you will find the files that are mentioned below in slightly different locations (much in the doc/ subdirectory), but they are all present somewhere in the source code archive as well, after you have done all build actions as described in the appendix.

  1. Create a temporary working directory and change into it:
    ~ $ mkdir ~/msged-work
    ~ $ cd ~/msged-work
    
  2. Unzip the Linux distribution archive:
    ~/msged-work $ unzip ~/msgte63l.zip
    
  3. Fix the file permissions of the executable file:
    ~/msged-work $ chmod guo+x msged
    
  4. The executable can be either installed system-globally in /usr/local/bin or some other location, or locally in the ~/bin subdirectory of your home directory:
    ~/msged-work $ su root
    Password:
    /home/someone/msged-work # cp msged /usr/local/bin
    /home/someone/msged-work # exit
    
  5. MsgEd TE by default searches it’s configuration file in the current user’s home directory, i.E. you need to copy the file sample.cfg to ~/.msged:
    ~/msged-work $ cp sample.cfg ~/.msged
    

    If you are an administrator and want to install MsgEd TE system-globally, you can make MsgEd TE read a different configuration file either by re-compiling MsgEd TE and define the MSGEDCFG macro (this is also done automatically when you compile MsgEd TE with huskymak.cfg - in this case the default location is msged.cfg in the etc subdirectory that you defined in huskymak.cfg). Or you can simply create a script that calls the MsgEd TE binary with the -c command line option. Specify the desired file name directly behind the -c.

    If you do this, you should, in the global configuration file, use a statement like include ~/.msged, so that each user can indivudally configure his own user name and other user specific settings.

  6. You have to copy some other files as well:
    ~/msged-work $ cp msghelp.dat ~/.msged.hlp
    ~/msged-work $ cp sample.tpl ~/.msged.tpl
    ~/msged-work $ cp scheme.004 ~/.msged.colors
    ~/msged-work $ cp readmaps.is1 ~/.msged.readmaps
    ~/msged-work $ cp writmaps.is1 ~/.msged.writmaps
    

    Note that this assumes that you are using ISO 8859-1 font encoding, as is usally the case on Western Unix systems. If you use ISO 8859-5 (Russian Unix vendor fonts), use readmaps.is5 and writmaps.is5 instead, and if you use KOI8-R (Russian Linux and FreeBSD with e.g. cronyx fonts), use readmaps.koi and writmaps.koi instead. See Using Special Characters like Umlauts or Cyrillics - The Charset Kludge, for more information on read and write map files, charset kludge lines, and character set recoding.

  7. Modify the configuration file ~/.msged with your favourite text editor according to your needs. See Configuration Reference, for detailed descriptions of each keyword that can be used in this file.
  8. You should now refer to the Unix specific release notes found below before trying to start MsgEd TE. They can save you from a lot of headaches ;-).
  9. Also, if you plan to share a message base between Non-Unix and Unix systems, you absolutely must read the chapter devoted to problems with shared message bases in heterogenous networks (see Using Fidonet software in network environments).

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