Gentoo Plugin

Here the installation of a plugin is described on an example with the help of emerge. For a lot of plugins it is a precondition that one has imported the portage tree of gentoo.de following this guide.

First Step: Which plugin?

First one must find out which plugin has the needed functionality and how its name is. For that the best way is the page Plugins. On the subpages for the single plugins there is sometimes a hint for what to look at when installing it on Gentoo.

The name of the plugin is almost always created from the prefix

vdr-

and the title of the corresponding page in the wiki (naturally skipped the postfix -plugin).

The plugin Mailbox-plugin now gives the gentoo name vdr-mailbox (or longer media-plugins/vdr-mailbox, but the category media-plugins can almost everytime be skipped).

Second Step: Installation

The plugin now is installed with this command:

echo "media-plugins/vdr-mailbox ~x86" >> /etc/portage/package.keywords
emerge vdr-mailbox

The addition of media-plugins/vdr-mailbox to the file /etc/portage/package.keywords is necessary for most plugins because there is no stable version of them available. It garanties that you get the newest available version (this can be also an alpha or beta version) installed.

Third Step: Activation

The activate the plugin one has two equal ways:

Either one edits

/etc/conf.d/vdr

and adds mailbox to this line. This changes

PLUGINS=""

to

PLUGINS="mailbox"

Multiple plugins are sperated by spaces.

PLUGINS="mailbox dvd femon"

Or second possibility: One calls emerge like in the installation step:

emerge --config vdr-mailbox

Fourth step: Configuration

Some plugins have an own configuration-file. This is then called /etc/conf.d/vdr.PLUGINNAME. e.g. for the Mailbox-Plugin /etc/conf.d/vdr.mailbox. The options inside here diverge from plugin to plugin and are documented directly inside this file.

After a restart of VDR one can configure the plugin (here the mailboxes) over the OSD.