Install an .ipk package without having the ipkg package management system (for end-users)

This article is based on the work of nix from www.linkstationwiki.org

In case you somehow obtained an .ipk package which you want to install, but if you don't have the ipkg package management system installed (or it is not working), the following are the steps to manually install an .ipk package:

su - mkdir /tmp/inst cd /tmp/inst wget http://url-of-package/package.ipk tar xvfz package.ipk tar xvfz control.tar.gz ./preinst cd / tar xvfz /tmp/inst/data.tar.gz cd /tmp/inst ./postinst cd /tmp rm -rf inst
 * Become root
 * Download the package. E.g.
 * Unpack the ipk outer wrapper
 * Unpack the control file
 * Look for scripts such as preinst and postinst
 * Run the preinst script, if any
 * Unpack the main tarball under /
 * Run the postinst script, if any
 * Cleanup

The above commands just peels of the different archive wrappers, as explained in the other ipkg articles, and unpacks the files into the file tree. What it doesn't do is to record what has been installed. So uninstalling the data can be quite cumbersome.