FreeBSD is an excellent operating system, be it on a Desktop (PC-BSD) or Server. Its stability and flexibility was never an issue, nor even software availability (21135 ports currently available to deploy).
Most of the time, ports will install the necessary dependencies to fulfill its requirement. But certain ports installs the X11 (X window system) libraries. [...]
There are various way of managing ports, using utilities. The usual “cd /usr/ports/<ports directory>; make; make install; make clean“, portmaster, portupgrade and others. Today, this post will brief on how to use portmanager to install, upgrade and delete ports.
Using portmanager to manage ports have a few advantage :
portmanager scans for what dependencies are needed and [...]
The default download program for ports is using fetch. fetch is fine but my personal preference is wget. wget uses 1 connection to download, unlike my previous post that mentioned “Download ports simultaneously with multiple connections“.
But wget gives extra bell and whistle like date/time of the download, log to file, continue from a partially downloaded [...]
Ports gets it’s sources from internet. If the sources is big or there are multiple tens of sources, the tendency to fail in the mid of the ports installation increases.
Scenario 1:
Bumpy internet broadband internet connection, like mine, will disconnect halfway when downloading big files (> 10 MB)
Scenario 2:
Large ports that depends on tens if not [...]
Ports randomly gets it’s source server list from /usr/ports/Mk/bsd.sites.mk, as defined by the port maintainer. But the top 1st choice of the list may not be the one physically near to us and thus the download speed is much desirable. Most of the time compiling ports doesn’t necessary takes a long time (like my 3 [...]
Gimp stands for “GNU Image Manipulation Program“, which is an open source image editing problem. It’s capability often compare to professional software but fortunately, Gimp acceptance as Pro image editing software is getting better. Even so, Gimp is still popular among beginner up to hobbyist user.
Gimp’s available on multiple platform and since it is open [...]
While adding GUI Desktop environment into my development box, an error encountered when compiling KDE4, the stable and nice looking Desktop environment. Compiling KDE4 can take quite some time as it depends on few hundred other ports. Alternatively, you can install KDE4 from the packages by using the command :
pkg_add -r kde4
But installing programs using [...]
Use the command :
swapinfo
Specified the parameter “-h” to convert the bytes to “h”uman readable form :
swapinfo -h
Sayonara !!!
Learned another thing today. The ports tree is just a repository of available software, it can be deleted & regenerated. Why would some one wants to delete the ports tree? It needed to be delete and regenerated because some patch was downloaded incorrectly and the problem stubbornly persists.
Sample of the error :
===> Applying FreeBSD patches [...]
Since FreeSBIE have not been updated since year 2007, its kernel recognizing new hardware starts to worry me as it is based on FreeBSD 6.2 and it is going to reach EoL (end of life) by end of this year, 2010. Is time to experiment on new way restoring backup.
The FreeBSD installation process does mentioned [...]
