INSTALLATION NOTE! The default configuration file has moved from /usr/lib/man.config or /etc/man.conf to /usr/share/misc/man.conf. Remove the former two. The country code dk has been replaced by the language code da. If you had Danish man pages installed, these should probably be moved. The quick installation goes in three steps: 1. configure -default 2. make 3. make install This should suffice for most people. The defaults are: Only English man pages, no message catalogs, man not suid, handle compressed man pages, compress cat pages, create cat pages whenever the appropriate directory exists, follow FHS by putting cat pages under /var/cache/man provided that that directory exists. In order to select man pages in other languages, replace Step 1 by 1. configure +lang de,en,nl or perhaps (especially when making a general distribution) by 1. configure +lang all This yields all the defaults, except for the language setting. People who want something other than the default also use three steps: 1. configure -ask 2. make 3. make install but have to answer a lot of questions during configure. In somewhat greater detail: 1. Run configure. This will grope around your system a bit and then ask you a number of questions. It will create a Makefile from the file Makefile.in. You may have to do some fine tuning to get things to work exactly right on your system. If you do, I'd like to know what changes you had to make to get things working. Man uses groff (nroff, troff) to format man pages. If you don't have *roff, then you can only use preformatted man pages. You can make man suid to some uid, say man, where man is the owner of the directories (like /usr/man/cat*) for formatted man pages. That way man can write formatted pages there, even when the directory does not have universal write permission. However, it is fairly easy to spoof man, so really this setup is not very different from the one where /usr/man/cat* has universal write permission. Never make man suid bin or daemon or root! Of course it is not necessary at all to cache formatted man pages. Formatting usually takes less than a second, and by not having preformatted pages one avoids problems with window width, integrity, etc. 2. Look at the man.conf file. This determines the programs and extensions used in compressing and uncompressing cat pages. It also determines the system-wide mappings from bin directories to man page directories. It was constructed by configure; you might want to make some changes. 3. Do a `make all', try it out, and then if you're happy with that, do a `make install'. You don't need to be root to use this set of programs. [Note: if you want to try man with the new, not yet installed, man.conf file, use "man -C ./man.conf ...".] 4. Install the whatis database(s) by running makewhatis. If you want to keep things absolutely current, you'll need to run this whenever you add new man pages. You might want to add an entry in your crontab.