Re: Newbie-question: Ports and Packages

["Justin C. Sherrill" <justin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sun, April 2, 2006 11:54 am, Thomas Schlesinger wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I'm a Gentoo Linux user and want to try out DragonFlyBSD, so I'm a *BSD
> rookie.
>
> I've installed DragonFlyBSD successfully, but I'm not able to install
> software
> with pkg_add. I've tried out to build the lsof-packages, following the
> Handbook
> (http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/~justin/handbook/packages-using.html).

The Handbook is out of date; we're using pkgsrc (pkgsrc.org) now. Early
releases of DragonFly used FreeBSD ports, but it worked less and less well
over time as FreeBSD and DragonFly diverged paths.

The quickest way to get to installing things: (as root, may be wrapped)
setenv PKG_PATH
ftp://packages.stura.uni-rostock.de/pkgsrc-current/DragonFly/1.4.0-RELEASE/i386/All
pkg_add name_of_package

For instance: pkg_add xorg; pkg_add xfce4; pkg_add firefox

That downloads premade binaries from the above URL. (http://www.pkgsrc.se
is a good place to go look for descriptive info on packages.)  A few big
packages don't completely work on DragonFly yet, like the completed KDE 3,
though most parts of it will install.  If you've been using Gentoo, you
will probably find binary package installation gratifyingly fast.

You may want to check the errata page for a few things that got missed;
you may need to do this first so that pkg_add will show in your path, for
instance:
http://www.dragonflybsd.org/main/errata1_4.cgi

The wiki has a HOWTO that goes into more detail about pkgsrc:
http://wiki.dragonflybsd.org/index.php/Set_up_and_use_pkgsrc

Ripping ports out of the Handbook and replacing with something about
pkgsrc just became higher priority for me...