My Experience with FreeBSD so far.

[gwarbot]

I am officially 24 hours into my project of having a lean mean FreeBSD machine. So far it has consisted of 4 formats and a complete reloads, non-stop manual referencing. thank god there is a manual. I recently failed gnome2 port, resulting in error 1 blah something kernel not enough. So now Ive updated my machine. I am currently fixing everything with portupgrade and we will see if gnome2 *Takes in a deep breath* will finally port successful. So I can set proc and the other necessaries. Monday! I tell you, by Monday I should have a fully operational FreeBSD desktop! Well...that is if I don't manage to bjork something before then.

"I have been watching the compiling forever, so I figured I would share my experience while stuff cooks"

thanks

 

[xibo]

Why not save the time and use pre-compiled packages? You can replace them with self-built ones after you made sure your setup works.

 

[Majorix]

Why not save the time and use pre-compiled packages? You can replace them with self-built ones after you made sure your setup works.

Exactly. This will not only save you time, but also prevent any problems that the port might have building, and some of the time they do. So as a beginner, stick to using binary packages.

And if you insist on doing it the hard way, please tell what exactly the error is. Since "error 1 blah something kernel not enough" is not very descriptive and it is funny how kernel is not enough, never happened to me.

 

[gwarbot]

The was error was lsaf x.x.x needed kernel sources. After googling I installed subversion then downloaded the source for FreeBSD9 stable. That seems to have fixed the issue. For future encounters I will keep a pen and paper handy so so I can jot these things down so I can share the exact error. Thanks for the feedback on the pkg's. I am doing ports because I was told to pick one or the other. I heard a system gets really funky if you install both all the time. So will portupgrade update pkg's?

 

[wblock@]

Packages are just the binary, compiled form of ports. When you install a port, it builds a package and installs that. Ports are slower because they have to be built, but build in the environment that is present. Packages are built on another machine, possibly with different versions of things installed, so there can be conflicts and upgrading can be annoying. So the "don't mix" advice has never been clear to me. I would say: use ports if you can, or understand that quick installation of packages comes at the cost of ease of upgrades and choice of build options. pkgng is a big improvement and will help both problems when it is ready for widespread use.

 

[gwarbot]

I have formatted and reinstalled a fifth time, this time I am taking detailed notes of everything I do. Gnome2 is now cooking again, well see how this goes. I kept running into dependency issues. I believe it was caused when I ran into the lsof-x.xx,x requires kernel sources
*** Error code 1

When I receive that error I ran portupgrade -af. However I believe this broke a bunch of other stuff when I did it. I was able to get the gnome2 port past the lsof error, however a bunch and I mean a lot of things were throwing errors when trying to port.

So I blew away the drive and decided to try again this time more consistent.

Here is my new process.

1. Install from cd, set root password,timezone,network settings,included the source. Create a user, then reboot.

2. Upon reboot I ran

# freebsd-update fetch
# freebsd-update install

both completed successfully.

# reboot

3. Once the system came back up I ran

# portsnap fetch 
# portsnap extract
# portsnap update

all 3 completed successfully no errors

4. cd to /usr/port/x11/gnome2

# make install clean  "I should have done" 
# make install-recursive 
# make install

now I wait while stuff cooks.

 

[wblock@]

When an error says "kernel source required", portupgrade -af is not a good reaction.

Please also see the previous message about post formatting.

 

[jb_fvwm2]

quick installation of packages comes at the cost of ease of upgrades and choice of build options. pkgng is a big improvement and will help both problems when it is ready for widespread use.

mount -t ufs -o union /dev/da0 /usr/ports/packages   # [FILE]/portmaster-download [/FILE] on /da0
portmaster -d -B -P -i -g ...   # -P grabs most everything from the thumbdrive...

Unless the ease of upgrades means one or more machines are nearly identical, in which case it could save hours yearly (it certainly does here....)
(I've also used ftp similarly to the thumbdrive, copied from the thumbdrive to the local machine, etc. ...) Unfortunately I still am dreading a mandatory usage of pkgng, using tab-completion in the shell extensively for quirks during the upgrade process when they appear.