Building Midnight Commander on Synology NAS

2019/11/03

We’ve got an ancient Synology NAS: DS212 from 2012. Now, we want to build a mc, so we can see a shiny blue double-panel file manager.

To make things more funny, let’s build from sources.

Where are we?

Just out of curiosity, let’s see the version:

uname -a

Something like this should show up:

Linux Vault 2.6.32.12 #24922 Tue Apr 23 17:32:06 CST 2019 armv5tel GNU/Linux synology_88f6282_212

Let’s switch to root

For the sake of simplicity, let’s switch to the root user. This will save us many of sudo ed commands.

sudo su -

Check the package manager status

Let’s assume that the package manager — ipkg is available.

Let’s update the list of available packages:

ipkg update

We should see an overview:

Downloading http://ipkg.nslu2-linux.org/optware-ng/buildroot-armv5eabi-ng/Packages.gz.
Inflating http://ipkg.nslu2-linux.org/optware-ng/buildroot-armv5eabi-ng/Packages.gz.
Updated list of available packages in /opt/lib/ipkg/lists/packages.

Install all necessary packages

Since we’ll build mc from the scratch, we need the compilation toolchain.

ipkg install make gcc binutils gettext glib slang gconv-modules

With fresh NAS installation, there is almost nothing available. Not even make, not even gcc and friends.

Some packages might take some time to download, no need to panic. The most heavy is the gcc with its 70MB of download.

Download sources

Let’s create a temporary directory for mc sources:

mkdir /volume1/@tmp/mc

Then, let’s switch to that directory:

cd /volume1/@tmp/mc

Time to download the sources via wget! We will pick the .bz2 variant, as this one can be uncompressed without any additional fancy tools:

wget http://ftp.midnight-commander.org/mc-4.8.23.tar.bz2

Now let’s deflate:

tar xvjf mc-4.8.23.tar.bz2

As a reminder, the j parameter stands for bz2 decompression.

Now, let’s dive into the deflated directory:

cd mc-4.8.23

Build from sources

Configure

Now is the time for the usual configure → make → make install.

However, configure will complain:

We might have old version of glib in global

checking for GLIB... no
configure: error: glib-2.0 not found or version too old (must be >= 2.26)

It’s attempting to pickup glib from Synology core system. Sadly, that one is really old.

However, we have a newer version, installed locally via ipkg, in /opt/lib. Let’s export the necessary environment variables GLIB_LIBS and GLIB_FLAGS, pointing to proper locations.

export GLIB_LIBS="-L/opt/lib -lglib-2.0"
export GLIB_CFLAGS="-I/opt/include/glib-2.0 -I/opt/lib/glib-2.0/include"

Now, it’s configure time! Let’s run this from the mc sources root.

./configure --prefix=/opt --with-screen=slang --with-slang-includes=/opt/include --with-slang-libs=/opt/lib --enable-charset

Alternatively, we might run the one-liner:

GLIB_LIBS="-L/opt/lib -lglib-2.0" \
  GLIB_CFLAGS="-I/opt/include/glib-2.0 -I/opt/lib/glib-2.0/include" \
  ./configure --prefix=/opt --with-screen=slang --with-slang-includes=/opt/include --with-slang-libs=/opt/lib --enable-charset

Make

Now that the project is configured, let’s simply build it:

make

After 20 minutes or so, the project will be compiled, built and prepared for installation. (Remember, that this is a poor ancient DS212 with 1.6GHz single-core).

Install

Now let’s install it.

make install

The binary will be made available in the /opt/bin/mc.

Command the midnight! (And troubleshoot)

The resulting binary is rather tricky.

Does the user have a home directory?

Verify that your user that is used to ssh has a properly set home directory. Otherwise, mc will complain:

admin@ds212:/$ /opt/bin/mc
Failed to run:
Cannot create /var/services/homes/admin/.config/mc directory

The obvious solution is to sudo su - to root.

Is the TERMINFO properly set?

On some installation, the TERMINFO is not properly set. To be on the safe side, let’s verify:

admin@ds212:/$ echo $TERMINFO
/usr/share/terminfo

Let’s fix this:

export TERMINFO=/opt/share/terminfo

Is the TERM properly set?

On some operating systems and some terminals, (ahm, MacOS + iTerm2), the TERM might not be properly understood by mc.

Let’s verify and fix:

admin@ds212:/$ echo $TERM
xterm-256color

export TERM=xterm

Does mc show question marks in filenames?

Some term+OS combinations do not show international characters properly. Especially, blue panels show question marks instead of cyrillic or äôľščť.

Looks like this is connected to the LC_ environment variables.

Let’s use the verified combo that should fix the issue.

export LANG="en_US.UTF-8" LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8" LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8" LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8" LC_MONETARY="en_US.UTF-8" LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8" LC_TIME="en_US.UTF-8" LC_ALL="";mc -X "/volume1/Data/Zalohy/downloads"

The relevant issue and workaround in mc ticket repository has number 3827.

Verify display bits

Make sure that Options | Display Bits is properly set:

Creating an overall running script

Let’s create a nifty script. As a root:

touch /opt/bin/mc-run.sh
chmod +x /opt/bin/mc-run.sh
vim /opt/bin/mc-run.sh

The contents will be simple:

export TERMINFO=/opt/share/terminfo TERM=xterm LANG="en_US.UTF-8" LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8" LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8" LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8" LC_MONETARY="en_US.UTF-8" LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8" LC_TIME="en_US.UTF-8" LC_ALL="";mc -c "$@"

Aliasing

Now, we can edit the profile file, and alias mc properly, to save many keystrokes:

Let’s run the editor

vim /root/.profile

Let’s add a simple line:

alias mc="/opt/bin/mc-run.sh

All future sessions will use the aliased mc command. In the current session, as a root, we can source ~/.profile to apply changes instantly.

References

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