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fwbackups - Installation

Linux

If fwbackups is not available in your distribution's repositories (see sections below), you may install fwbackups via the source tarball. Please ensure you have the following dependencies installed on your system:

  • gettext
  • A cron service such as dcron, vixie-cron or cronie
  • Python
  • PyGTK (including Glade support)
  • pycrypto (often called python-crypto)
  • paramiko (often called python-paramiko)
  • Optional: libnotify bindings for Python (often called python-notify)

Then download fwbackups to your home directory and run:

tar xfj fwbackups-VERSION.tar.bz2
cd fwbackups-VERSION
./configure --prefix=/usr
make
su -c "make install"

You will be prompted to enter the root password at the last command. You may also use sudo make install for the last command if your system is configured for use with sudo.

Note that some Linux distributions default saving downloads to the ~/Downloads folder; if this is the case, copy the fwbackups tarball to your home folder (the folder containing Desktop, Documents, Downloads, etc) before executing the commands below.

Fedora Linux

fwbackups is included in the Fedora Linux repositories. Simply open the Add/Remove Software utility and search for "fwbackups".

Ubuntu/Mint Linux

To install fwbackups from source on Ubuntu, download the source tarball to your home folder and then open a terminal session (select Applications > System Tools > Terminal). Type the following commands into the terminal:

sudo apt-get install gettext autotools-dev intltool python-crypto python-paramiko python-gtk2 python-glade2 python-notify cron
tar xfj fwbackups-VERSION.tar.bz2
cd fwbackups-VERSION
./configure --prefix=/usr
make && sudo make install

Some Ubuntu distributions no longer include the Python "site-packages" directory in their search path, which may prevent fwbackups from starting. If this is the case, execute this code in addition to the code above:

PYTHONVER=$(python -c 'import sys;print "%s.%s" % (sys.version_info[0], sys.version_info[1])')
sudo ln -s ../site-packages/fwbackups /usr/lib/python${PYTHONVER}/dist-packages/fwbackups

 

Windows

fwbackups packages most of the dependencies for Windows in an easy-to-use installer. Simply visit the Downloads page and use the full setup installer to install Python 2.6, PyCron 0.5.9 as well as the required Python modules and GTK+ runtime.

Due to cryptography software export restrictions, Diffingo Solutions Inc. cannot distribute binary versions of the paramiko or pycrypto libraries. However, Achim of Qustodium has kindly offered to provide the fwbackups cryptography module installer on his personal website. Click here to download the cryptography module installer for fwbackups 1.43.3/1.43.4. This installer will install both paramiko and pycrypto for use with fwbackups on your system.

 

OS X

Although fwbackups does run on OS X, at the moment it requires some manual work to get started. To install PyGTK on OS X, see the GTK-OSX project. It provides PyGTK as well as many other dependencies required to run fwbackups. However, some dependencies such as python-paramiko and python-crypto still need to be installed manually.