Here's a perl script that will fetch official packages for you. Grab the file below and untar it somewhere. You probably want to be logged in as root.

'pkg-get': pkg-get.tar.gz

I've included wget in the archive; it uses this to fetch stuff. Unfortunately you need perl to get it going, so you need to be able to install that one package (d'oh!) Yeah, it's not perfect yet - you can't use the package installer to fetch and install perl until you've fetched and installed perl :-) When I do it in C (soon, soon) it won't need that, only (maybe) wget.

Now go into the pkg directory and type:

export PKGROOT=~/pkg
pkg-get update

This will download a directory listing of ftp://atheos.sourceforge.net/pub/atheos/packages/ and parse it to figure out what all the packages there are called. Now decide what you want to install, then type:

pkg-get install 

For example, if you want to install the text editor 'emacs', type:

pkg-get install emacs

If you don't already have a package in mind, type:

pkg-get list

for a list of packages that can be installed. It'll tell you where they are (Packages-sourceforge) and what the name you should use when you want to install them is.

If either of those two commands don't work, don't panic; this is just my first hack at this project, and it doesn't do much yet. There seems to be a weird bug in AtheOS that screws up FTP connections. What I'm finding is that wget tries and tries and tries, but can't get any files, or failsto list the directory. Just run pkg-get again if that happens; keep doing that and it'll work eventually.

More later ...