no Internet during install

[mrcoolhead]

Why do I need to connect to the Internet while I am installing from the ports collection?
Is there a way to install from ports and not be connected to the Internet?

 

[wblock@]

The source ("dist") files for each port have to be downloaded from somewhere. If you have only a limited connection to the net, you can use # make fetch or # make fetch-recursive to download the files without building the port.

Or you can use # make fetch-list to show the URLs of the files needed so you can download them by hand.

 

[mrcoolhead]

So I am guessing that if I didn't have an Internet connection that I cannot ever install from ports?

 

[wblock@]

Unless you can get the distfiles elsewhere, no. Of course, you can install packages, which are precompiled versions of the ports: http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/packages-using.html