Hey folks, I've been reading through the FreeBSD Handbook (great documentation, by the way) but I've been having some trouble. I'm new to FreeBSD but consider myself fairly knowledgeable in Red Hat and Debian based Linux systems.
Anyway, my issues are as follows:
I get hangs when using pkg_add. For example, I have left
It's been that way for quite a long time now. I set my PACKAGEROOT to ftp://ftp8.us.FreeBSD.org. Browsing there on my desktop, I had no problem retrieving libXTrap (using Firefox). Other packages seemed to download just fine -- it's just this one that gives me problems. Is there an easy solution here? I suppose I could download and install it manually but I have to say if I had to do this more than a few times I'd be pretty frustrated.
Another issue I've come across with pkg_add is that it seems some mirrors don't have certain packages. After I changed my PACKAGEROOT as described above there weren't any issues locating them, just the hangs as described above. Is there a way to force a timeout on retrieval of packages? Coupling this with a retry after failure would be ideal I think. Barring that, is there some way to ensure that I get a mirror that has everything (besides "choose one, hope it works, change it if it doesn't").
If these package issues are not resolvable I might just roll ports. I haven't yet had problems with them building (just takes a long time). When building from the ports tree, is there any way to say (for a given build) "don't ask me about configure options, just give me the defaults"? This would be useful for long running builds like Gnome, I think.
Lastly, if you have any particularly helpful resources for users new to FreeBSD (coming from Linux, specifically) I would certainly appreciate suggestions. I've found a few already but they seem pretty slim compared to what I expect (http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/articles/linux-users/software.html, for instance).
Thanks in advance for the help.
John
Anyway, my issues are as follows:
I get hangs when using pkg_add. For example, I have left
pkg add -vr xorg gnome2
running for about 15 minutes but it seems to be stuck trying to get a package via FTP. The last line of output is
Code:
>>> RETR libXTrap-1.0.0.tbz
It's been that way for quite a long time now. I set my PACKAGEROOT to ftp://ftp8.us.FreeBSD.org. Browsing there on my desktop, I had no problem retrieving libXTrap (using Firefox). Other packages seemed to download just fine -- it's just this one that gives me problems. Is there an easy solution here? I suppose I could download and install it manually but I have to say if I had to do this more than a few times I'd be pretty frustrated.
Another issue I've come across with pkg_add is that it seems some mirrors don't have certain packages. After I changed my PACKAGEROOT as described above there weren't any issues locating them, just the hangs as described above. Is there a way to force a timeout on retrieval of packages? Coupling this with a retry after failure would be ideal I think. Barring that, is there some way to ensure that I get a mirror that has everything (besides "choose one, hope it works, change it if it doesn't").
If these package issues are not resolvable I might just roll ports. I haven't yet had problems with them building (just takes a long time). When building from the ports tree, is there any way to say (for a given build) "don't ask me about configure options, just give me the defaults"? This would be useful for long running builds like Gnome, I think.
Lastly, if you have any particularly helpful resources for users new to FreeBSD (coming from Linux, specifically) I would certainly appreciate suggestions. I've found a few already but they seem pretty slim compared to what I expect (http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/articles/linux-users/software.html, for instance).
Thanks in advance for the help.
John