The OpenEmbedded based system uses a package manager (ipkg) for installing, updating and removing software packages. This chapter contains information on common tasks when using ipkg.

Get the list of available packages

Before you can install additional packages or update them you have to get the current list of available packages. To do this use this command:

ipkg update

Upgrade all installed packages to the latest version

From time to time, there might be updates to some packages, mostly because of bugfixes. To get these updated packages run following command after getting the current list of available packages.

ipkg upgrade

Installing new software

If you need a package, that is currently not installed, just use this command (where $package has to be replaced with the name of the package):

ipkg install $package

Remove a package

If you do not need a package (anymore) and want to get rid of it, run:

ipkg remove $package

There are cases where you might be trying to remove packages that are needed by other packages. If this happens ipkg will list all packages that depend on the package to be removed. You now have three choices:

1. Leave the package in the system
2. Remove the package and all packages depending on this package
3. Remove only the package

Choice 1 might be your only choice if you depend on the other packages. If you don't need the other packages, you can of course go with Choice 2 and remove all packages. This can be achieved with the following command:

ipkg remove -recursive $package

Choice 3 is not advised because it is very likely that the dependent packages are broken afterwards, but if you really want to do that, use the following command:

ipkg remove -force-depends $package

List all available packages

Before installing a package you certainly want to know, which packages are available. Just enter

ipkg list

to do this.

Search for a package in the package list

As ipkg has no native ability to search in the package list you have to use tools like grep to search the package list, e.g.

ipkg list|grep mysql

to find all packages containing mysql in their package name oder description.

List all installed packages

If you want to know, which packages are currently installed, run

ipkg list_installed