Enabling non-standard package repositories

/docs/gears/advanced-management/enabling-nonstandard-repos/

UBOS repositories

Like many other Linux distributions, UBOS Linux is split into multiple package repositories. By default, the following repositories are enabled:

  • os: contains the core operating system;
  • tools: contains useful tools for development;
  • hl: contains “head-less” application-level packages, such as web Apps and Accessories.

On x86_64 PCs, UBOS also has:

  • virt: for virtualization / VirtualBox support.

In addition, the following repositories are not enabled by default:

  • os-experimental: operating system components that so far, are deemed experimental, that may either not work sufficiently well, or that may be removed without notice.

  • hl-experimental: similar, experimental “head-less” application-level packages.

  • peergraph: the packages for PeerGraph.

  • toyapps: Apps that are useful for development or for understanding UBOS, but not ever intended to be run in production.

Each one of those repositories is defined in a separate file in directory /etc/pacman.d/repositories.d. The difference between the enabled and disabled repositories is simply that the data in the disabled files is “commented out”.

To enable a disabled repository, find the corresponding file, open it in an editor, and undo the “commenting out”. For example, to enable the toyapps repo, edit /etc/pacman.d/repositories.d/toyapps, and remove the leading # characters, so the file looks as follows:

[toyapps]
Server = http://depot.ubosfiles.net/$channel/$arch/toyapps

Then, run ubos-admin update so pacman will pick up the new repository.

3rd-party repositories

You can add additional files into /etc/pacman.d/repositories.d that specify additional repositories. You can use one of the existing files in that directory as a template. Once you have added the file, run ubos-admin update, otherwise pacman will not pick up your new repository.

Note two key distinctions between UBOS and its upstream distro Arch Linux:

  • Do not edit the repositories in /etc/pacman.conf directly. UBOS will overwrite it there.

  • You can use the symbol $channel in the URL to indicate the UBOS Release Channel.