Question

Is there a commonly used approach for displaying how to get started instructions to a user after a .deb installer has finished installing a package?

I need an approach that works for users working via a terminal as well as from a desktop environment.

Server admins will probably know to check for a README file but many others won t.

Answer 1

After a bit of experimentation it looks like I can detect how the .deb package has been installed by checking the value of the DEBIAN_FRONTEND variable in the postint.sh script. When run from the desktop it contains the value gnome , but when run via dpkg from the command-line it isn t set, so something like this might work:

HELP_URL="http://mysite.com/help.html"
if [ "$DEBIAN_FRONTEND" = "gnome" ]; then
    nohup gnome-www-browser $HELP_URL &
else 
    echo For help visit $HELP_URL
fi

Answer 2

I d suggest running the "tty" command from your postinstall script. That will tell you if you have a tty and are running as a terminal program. Once you know that you could either "more" a readme file if you re running in terminal mode or you could call "gnome-text-editor" if not. You might also want to put in some detection to check "/etc/lsb-release" so that you know what distribution your .deb is being installed on and which editors will be suitable.

Answer 3

I use the tty command like Benj suggested, but I use the dialog command to display post install chatter if its available on the system.

Try this command:

dialog --backtitle "All done" --title "Installation complete" --textbox /etc/passwd 0 0

... but replace /etc/passwd with your README of choice. Its a much nicer way to scroll through information.

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