It is hard for me to tell what tools I should be using to work with ports and packages. I was trying to set up a 64bit 8.2 machine as a desktop environment, with Firefox 4 and Flash installed. It looked like I was going to need to track the 8.x stable branch in order to get a Firefox package, and I was having some problems pinning down which version of Flash I should use (they have a new version since 8l2 was released). I decided to stop and just make sure I understood how I was supposed to be working with ports and packages.
I've have been reading about cvsup, freebsd-update, portsnap, portupgrade, and portmaster. In general, I think I would like to use packages when possible, since I expect to be doing some installs on low-powered machines (my old laptops). I don't want to build everything from the ports tree (unless I have to). I know that I can set the environment variable PACKAGESITE in order to get packages from 8.x instead of 8.2, and the packages would at worst be a month old. I have also read portupgrade can be used to upgrade ports (obvious enough). What I have not really seen yet, is an explanation of when you might want to use the different tools. I have read some tools don't need certain other things installed, but I don't know why that is significant. Perhaps some of the tools are only used in rare situations, and I don't need to consider using them. I also don't know how mutually exclusive they are. I am working on a script to automatically load up all the software I want on my desktop, below are some of the sub-routines that show what I am trying to do. I think the script worked when 8.2 was new, but things seemed to have changed and it no longer works so well. I want to make it change-proof. loadPorts() { echo loadPorts... freebsd-update fetch install portsnap fetch extract } loadFF() { echo loadFF... pkg_add -r firefox echo 'sem_load="YES"' >> /boot/loader.conf } loadApps() { echo loadApps... apps="bash unzip p7zip vlc xmms subversion mplayer openbox icewm cmdwatch xfe miro filezilla" for x in $apps do pkg_add -r $x done } loadFonts() { echo loadFonts... cd /usr/ports/x11-fonts/webfonts make install clean pkg_add -r dejavu cd sed ' /Section "Module"/ a\ Load "freetype"\ Load "type1" ' /etc/X11/xorg.conf > /etc/X11/xorg.conf.sed cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf.sed /etc/X11/xorg.conf sed ' /Section "Files"/ a\ FontPath "/usr/local/lib/X11/fonts/webfonts/"\ FontPath "/usr/local/lib/X11/fonts/dejavu/" ' /etc/X11/xorg.conf > /etc/X11/xorg.conf.sed cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf.sed /etc/X11/xorg.conf fc-cache -f -v } loadFlash() { echo loadFlash... kldload linux pkg_add -r linux_base-f10 echo 'linux_enable="YES"' >> /etc/rc.conf echo 'linproc /usr/compat/linux/proc linprocfs rw 0 0' >> /etc/fstab mount -a pkg_add -r nspluginwrapper cd /usr/ports/www/linux-f10-flashplugin10 mkdir -p /usr/ports/distfiles/flashplugin/10.1r53 scp me@192.168.200.2:install_flash_player_10_linux.tar.gz /usr/ports/distfiles/flashplugin/10.1r53/ make install clean cd mkdir /usr/local/lib/browser_plugins ln -s /usr/local/lib/npapi/linux-f10-flashplugin/libflashplayer.so /usr/local/lib/browser_plugins/ # read -p "pausing" rehash } _______________________________________________ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org"