• Acquire root shell
• Add openthinclient.org GPG key
• Add archive.openthinclient.org to sources.list
• Update apt database
• Install development packages
• Install a web server
• Prepare package directory
• Add new package URL to openthinclient server sources.list
• Make Packages your own

Acquire root shell

As you have to be root to execute the following code sniplets you need to acquire a root shell. Open a terminal and enter the following command:

Enter your user password if prompted and you will be able to execute commands as root in this terminal.

Add openthinclient.org GPG key

Ubuntu packages provided by openthinclient.org are cryptographically signed and installing the openthinclient.org GPG key will make that signing key known to your system. It can be downloaded from http://archive.openthinclient.org/key.gpg and installed with apt-key:

Add archive.openthinclient.org to sources.list

openthinclient.org provides two repositories for packages, one for the developer support packages and one for the source packages of the OS. They can be found at http://archive.openthinclient.org/openthinclient/devel/ and http://archive.openthinclient.org/openthinclient/manager/ respectively. You will have to add those two repositories to your /etc/apt/sources.list:

Update apt database

To activate the new repositories you will then have to update the apt database:

Install development packages

We are providing developer helper packages which prepare the build system to build your own packages. At the moment there is just one: tcos-dev. Please install it, it will provide build scripts for the openthinclient OS and make sure that the basic standard developer packages are installed:


As this package depends on xlibs-dev (which isn't available anymore in this form) I edited the .deb-package and replaced the dependency "xlibs-dev" with the new names of the seperated packages.
Feel free to download this package from my server: tcos-dev hacked package
and install it using your package manager:

Install a web server

To be able to install your freshly built openthinclient packages, you need a web server. Just install a webserver of your choice on your development system.
For example the well known Apache web server:

Prepare package directory

Finally you have to create a directory for the packages you are going to create and an Packages.gz file inside this directory. This directory will be served by the web server and will be availible via http. As the web-root directory of the Apache web server is /var/www create a meaningful package directory inside this web-root:

Now you should be able to download/display the (yet empty) Packages.gz file via the following URL:
http://localhost/openthinclient/manager-contrib/Packages.gz
So if you see a blank page without errors this is fine because there are no *.deb files in the package directory yet.

Add new package URL to openthinclient server sources.list

Now you need to configure the openthinclient server to include the new package directory. Login to your openthinclient server machine and change directory to your openthinclient installation directory. There you have to edit server/default/data/nfs/root/etc/sources.list to include the following line:

Let's say the fixed IP of your development server is 192.168.2.33 the sources.list would be:

After changing this sources.list you have to restart the openthinclient server.

Make Packages your own

If you want to build your own packages you might want to let people know who built them.
Change the following lines to your needs and put them in your local .bashrc or in the
global /etc/bash.bashrc configuration.