what am I doing wrong?

[natan]

so I'm new to FreeBSD, I just installed 7.2 today, and I've been having all kinds of problems.

I didn't think I was doing anything wrong, but I must have, because it can't be this complicated?

from what I read it was supposed to be okay to run 7-2-RELEASE, and use packages from 7-STABLE, no? so I set PACKAGESITE to 7-STABLE, and I did an upgrade with portupgrade -aP, and that is when the trouble started

first, all gtk apps stopped working. I forgot what the error was, but I fixed it by recompiling gtk from ports

then sudo stopped working, something about some symbol being undefined, and I reinstalled that from ports, and it worked

now I made a fresh install of mplayer from packages, and the sound works, but there is no video. the error is such:

X11 error: BadShmSeg (invalid shared segment parameter)% 0.7% 0 0

so then I figured I'll just reinstall this from ports too, but this time, no dice

I don't get it, why is everything breaking so bad?

 

[mickey]

I don't get it, why is everything breaking so bad?

Mixing ports and packages is generally not such a good idea.

While packages are supposed to save you some time
during the installation, ports give you way more
control over compile-time options.

Provided that you have a reasonably fast machine, I would suggest to go with ports only.
A good starting point would be, to bring your ports
tree up-to-date, using either portsnap or csup, and
then update all installed software using either
portupgrade or portmaster.

More information regarding this matter can be found
in the handbook and in various threads.

 

[natan]

I like saving time, and 99% of the time I don't care for compile time options. My machine is not very fast either, compiling say, firefox, is a pain.