# Installing Midnight Commander on Raspberry Pi



## balanga (Aug 22, 2014)

I have just managed to install FreeBSD on my Raspberry Pi which is ARM-based. I have, over the years, got used to having Midnight Commander around and would like to install it on my system. What is the quickest way to do this? I don't think a binary package is available and installing the whole ports tree is likely to take several hours. Is there any way to just fetch part of the ports tree such as 'shells'?


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## SirDice (Aug 22, 2014)

Fetching and installing the ports tree is a little slower than on a recent AMD64 or i386 but not that much. What is going to take a long time is actually building a port. And because there are no packages for it yet that's the only option you have.

There's some work going on to build packages for ARM on AMD64 or i386 using ports-mgmt/poudriere. I haven't tried it myself yet but it could be an alternative.


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## balanga (Aug 22, 2014)

Installing the ports tree is a real PITA, but I've done it, and I wouldn't mind too much if I had managed to build anything, but both mc and mc-light failed to build...

Is a build log generated anywhere?

There is a message to set MAKE_JOBS_UNSAFE=yes and rebuild, but I'm very new to all this and have no idea how or where to set this.

Is there a simple file commander I could attempt to build as an alternative to mc? I'm really struggling with just the command prompt.


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## SirDice (Aug 25, 2014)

balanga said:
			
		

> There is a message to set MAKE_JOBS_UNSAFE=yes and rebuild, but I'm very new to all this and have no idea how or where to set this.


Don't set it in any case. It's not meant for building ports but is a left-over from adding staging support to the ports tree.

And yes, building on the Raspberry Pi is a royal PITA. It's slow and a lot of build dependencies (like GCC) fail to build properly.


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