Hello misc,
I have the following problem with my ports: I'm running the standard
OpenBSD 3.8 system configured as mail server and etc. When configuring
the server I realised that I will actually work 4 hours/day on this
machine and I said to me that I should make my life easier. So I
installed Kde, GNOME, WindowMaker, GIMP, Mozilla etc. They had a lot of
depencies... What to do, what to do... They should be downloaded and
installed manually (and I had no time). So I downloaded the ports
collection and unpacked it. Then I made a small script where I some
"make install" for Kde, GNOME etc. knowing that this will also install
from source all the depencies. Anyway, the process worked very well for
3 days. Then, surprise! GNOME and KDE kept crashing from 5 to 5 minutes
and programs were also crashing all the time. I realised that this was a
bad move and that OpenBSD does not recommed this approach. I switched to
WindowMaker. Apparently all works well, but... Mozilla 1.7.8 kept
crashing (very rarely, but once I lost all my bookmarks). I deleted it
and downloaded the Mozilla 1.7.12-gtk2. It was great, it worked well. I
also installed XMMS+plugins and GAIM+plugins from packages (they were
previously installed from ports and were quite messy). Gooood! Then they
started crashing AGAIN! An idea crossed my mind: GTK was compiled from
ports, maybe this is the cause! But tell me, how can I uninstall GTK
when a lot of packages depend on it and pkg_delete doesn't let me do
that? I don't want to delete, then reinstall all the programs that
depend on GTK. Oh, and from time to time X11 crashes too (this is
strange, because X11 is shipped by OpenBSD). I don't know that happens.
A few weeks ago someone raised a discussion about that quality of
ports. They seem quite good to me. I do a comparison to the ports on
FreeBSD 4.{9,10,11} and FreeBSD 5.1 (5.3 solved some issues). I had A
LOT of problems with ports (in fact packages) on FreeBSD. Some of them
were unusable. By comparison, the packages from OpenBSD are much, much
stable. There will be also some problems with these ports in BSDs, but
they will get better and better, that's the truth.
And another thing: I have a multimedia keyboard and I want to use it
with XMMS. I have a plugin: XF86Audio Keys Control nut is says I must
use `xmodmap` to configure the multimedia keys and I don't know how.
Could someone tell me? I googled this matter, but obtained no result
after following some instructions destined for GNU/Linux.
Yours in BSDness,
Gabriel POPA
