%general-entities; ]> Man-DB Three adjustments need to be made to the sources of Man-DB. The first one changes the location of translated manual pages that come with Man-DB, in order for them to be accessible in both traditional and UTF-8 locales: mv man/de{_DE.88591,} && mv man/es{_ES.88591,} && mv man/it{_IT.88591,} && mv man/ja{_JP.eucJP,} && sed -i 's,\*_\*,??,' man/Makefile.in The second change is a sed substitution to delete the /usr/man lines in the man_db.conf file to prevent redundant results when using programs such as whatis: sed -i '/\t\/usr\/man/d' src/man_db.conf.in The third change accounts for programs that Man-DB should be able to find at runtime, but that haven't been installed yet: cat >>include/manconfig.h.in <<"EOF" #define WEB_BROWSER "exec /usr/bin/lynx" #define COL "/usr/bin/col" #define VGRIND "/usr/bin/vgrind" #define GRAP "/usr/bin/grap" EOF The col program is a part of the Util-linux package, lynx is a text-based web browser (see BLFS for installation instructions), vgrind converts program sources to Groff input, and grap is useful for typesetting graphs in Groff documents. The vgrind and grap programs are not normally needed for viewing manual pages. They are not part of LFS or BLFS, but you should be able to install them yourself after finishing LFS if you wish to do so. Prepare Man-DB for compilation: ./configure --prefix=/usr --enable-mb-groff --disable-setuid --enable-mb-groff This tells the man program to use the ascii8 and nippon Groff devices for formatting non-ISO-8859-1 manual pages. --disable-setuid This disables making the man program setuid to user man. Compile the package: make Install the package: make install Additional information regarding the compression of man and info pages can be found in the BLFS book at . Linux distributions have different policies concerning the character encoding in which manual pages are stored in the filesystem. E.g., RedHat stores all manual pages in UTF-8, while Debian uses language-specific (mostly 8-bit) encodings. This leads to incompatibility of packages with manual pages designed for different distributions. LFS uses the same conventions as Debian. The relationship between language codes and the expected encoding of manual pages is listed below. Man-DB automatically converts them to the locale encoding while viewing. Language (code) Encoding Danish (da) ISO-8859-1 German (de) ISO-8859-1 English (en) ISO-8859-1 Spanish (es) ISO-8859-1 Finnish (fi) ISO-8859-1 French (fr) ISO-8859-1 Irish (ga) ISO-8859-1 Galician (gl) ISO-8859-1 Indonesian (id) ISO-8859-1 Icelandic (is) ISO-8859-1 Italian (it) ISO-8859-1 Dutch (nl) ISO-8859-1 Norwegian (no) ISO-8859-1 Portuguese (pt) ISO-8859-1 Swedish (sv) ISO-8859-1 Czech (cs) ISO-8859-2 Croatian (hr) ISO-8859-2 Hungarian (hu) ISO-8859-2 Japanese (ja) EUC-JP Korean (ko) EUC-KR Polish (pl) ISO-8859-2 Russian (ru) KOI8-R Slovak (sk) ISO-8859-2 Turkish (tr) ISO-8859-9 Manual pages in languages not in the list are not supported. Norwegian doesn't work now because of the transition from no_NO to nb_NO locale, and Korean is non-functional because of the incomplete Groff patch. If upstream distributes the manual pages in the same encoding as Man-DB expects, the manual pages can be copied to /usr/share/man/[language code]. E.g., French manual pages () can be installed with the following command: mkdir -p /usr/share/man/fr && cp -rv man? /usr/share/man/fr If upstream distributes manual pages in UTF-8 (i.e., for RedHat) instead of the encoding listed in the table above, they have to be converted from UTF-8 to the encoding listed in the table before installation. E.g., Spanish manual pages () can be installed with the following commands: mkdir -p /usr/share/man/es && find man? -type f | grep -v 'man7/iso_8859-7.7' | \ while read F ; do iconv -f UTF-8 -t ISO-8859-1 $F >tmp ; mv tmp $F done && cp -rv man? /usr/share/man/es The need to exclude the man7/iso_8859-7.7 file from the conversion process because it is already in ISO-8859-1 is a packaging bug in man-pages-es-1.55. Future versions should not require this workaround. Installed programs accessdb, apropos, catman, lexgrog, man, mandb, manpath, and whatis Short Descriptions accessdb Dumps the whatis database contents in human-readable form accessdb apropos Searches the whatis database and displays the short descriptions of system commands that contain a given string apropos catman Creates or updates the pre-formatted manual pages catman lexgrog Displays one-line summary information about a given manual page lexgrog man Formats and displays the requested manual page man mandb Creates or updates the whatis database mandb whatis Searches the whatis database and displays the short descriptions of system commands that contain the given keyword as a separate word whatis