# Aquiring more information



## ikbendeman (Dec 3, 2009)

Is there anywhere I can find out more information on:

Where to download STABLE and CURRENT ISO's (Not just the release ISOs that the freebsd.org website has listed). I need to try stable because 8.0 RELEASE will not boot on my machine. Mount root says its waiting on usbus2 or something and my root is on slice sd4. 

I'm new to freebsd, I have read the appropriate part of the handbook and man pages, and I want more indepth information into how the ports system works because I can't seem to get anything to compile properly. The man pages and the handbook say nothing about old versions of the source, or whether there are different trees for 7.2-RELEASE and 8.0-RELEASE, and if there are I can't figure out why I can't get ANYTHING to compile in 7.2.

I like the way the idea of freebsd but so far I can't get too much to work (I can't even get portupgrade to compile things properly, and I don't just want to install packages, thats part of why I'm trying to switch to freebsd). Somebody help. I'm incredibly frustrated, especially since 7.2 was "somewhat" working on my laptop before I tried to install 8.0 on it.


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## aragon (Dec 3, 2009)

There's a "snapshots" directory off "/pub/FreeBSD" on FreeBSD mirror FTP sites, but I don't see any recent snapshots there.  All of them are from July.


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## SirDice (Dec 3, 2009)

ikbendeman said:
			
		

> The man pages and the handbook say nothing about old versions of the source, or whether there are different trees for 7.2-RELEASE and 8.0-RELEASE, and if there are I can't figure out why I can't get ANYTHING to compile in 7.2.


There's only one ports tree. The releases contain a snapshot of that tree at the time when the release was made.


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## ikbendeman (Dec 3, 2009)

Thank you for your replies. I really don't want to go back to linux...

So the ports tree is the same for 8.0-current and 7.2 release and 8.0 current?

And I think maybe my boot problems have to do with having /etc on its own partition?


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## ikbendeman (Dec 3, 2009)

oh and when i said slice sd4, sorry, I'm mixing up my linux and unix names. ad4s1... and why is it that my drive doesn't start at ad0 anyways?... is this because:

```
IDE1Master: ad0
IDE1Slave:  ad1
IDE2Master: ad2
IDE3Slave:  ad3
SataCon1:   ad4
```

?

Sorry for being such a newbie. I just want to learn to get this all to work. I just need my wifi, smplayer, kde4, xvid, ffmpeg and (hopefully) flash to work and then linux can go bye! I'm sick of it. I'll post back if my new install will work without /etc being on its own partition.


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## SirDice (Dec 3, 2009)

ikbendeman said:
			
		

> oh and when i said slice sd4, sorry, I'm mixing up my linux and unix names. ad4s1... and why is it that my drive doesn't start at ad0 anyways?... is this because:
> IDE1Master: ad0
> IDE1Slave:  ad1
> IDE2Master: ad2
> ...


Correct.



> Sorry for being such a newbie. I just want to learn to get this all to work. I just need my wifi, smplayer, kde4, xvid, ffmpeg and (hopefully) flash to work and then linux can go bye! I'm sick of it. I'll post back if my new install will work without /etc being on its own partition.



You may want to choose A for automatic partitioning. I do advise on giving /usr/home it's own filesystem though, that's not done by default and it will make it somewhat easier to reinstall without nuking your data.


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## phoenix (Dec 3, 2009)

ikbendeman said:
			
		

> Thank you for your replies. I really don't want to go back to linux...
> 
> So the ports tree is the same for 8.0-current and 7.2 release and 8.0 current?
> 
> And I think maybe my boot problems have to do with having /etc on its own partition?



Yes.  Don't separate /etc from /

How do you expect the kernel to read /etc/fstab to know how to mount /etc?


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## ikbendeman (Dec 4, 2009)

thanks, in the future i'll just tar /etc up instead... and can someone clear up the ports tree thing for me? I've yet to find one clear, concise definition of how it works... (chronologically and through different releases)


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## SirDice (Dec 4, 2009)

Read post #3. There is only one (1) ports tree.


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## ikbendeman (Dec 4, 2009)

so how am I supposed to compile software from the ports tree on a fresh install? Only through packages or through updating all software on the system, even if that changes my installation from 8.0-RELEASE to 8.0-STABLE/8.0-CURRENT? I guess I just don't get it. I don't get what the point is of even installing RELEASE or STABLE if you just have to update everything to CURRENT to even get any applications you want to use to compile on your system.


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## BeautifulFish (Dec 4, 2009)

you really should read this:
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/books/handbook/current-stable.html

now there is 8.0-RELEASE 8.0-STABLE AND *9.0*-CURRENT

just use RELEASE for now, extract the ports tree from sysinstall, install software like pidgin by:
cd /usr/ports/net-im/pidgin/ && make install clean

more about installing software:
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/ports.html


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## SirDice (Dec 4, 2009)

ikbendeman said:
			
		

> so how am I supposed to compile software from the ports tree on a fresh install?


The best way would be to install absolutely nothing except the ports tree during install. Then update the tree using csup or portsnap. Once the ports tree is up to date start building applications. 



> Only through packages or through updating all software on the system, even if that changes my installation from 8.0-RELEASE to 8.0-STABLE/8.0-CURRENT?


The -RELEASE, -STABLE and -CURRENT nominators are for the Base OS. The base OS and the ports are 2 separate entities.



> I guess I just don't get it. I don't get what the point is of even installing RELEASE or STABLE if you just have to update everything to CURRENT to even get any applications you want to use to compile on your system.


Again, the applications in the ports tree have _nothing_ to do with the freebsd OS. Do NOT update to -CURRENT, it's a work in progress and is most likely going to be seriously unstable.

For the base freebsd OS you can stick to a -RELEASE or -STABLE. Currently that's RELENG_8_0 for 8.0-RELEASE and RELENG_8 for 8.0-STABLE. When tracking RELENG_8_0 with csup you will always get 8.0-RELEASE plus security patches (when available). If you track RELENG_8 you will currently get 8.0-STABLE. This will have all the nice new features added eventually. It will also progress to 8.1-STABLE, 8.2-STABLE etc.


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## phoenix (Dec 4, 2009)

ikbendeman said:
			
		

> so how am I supposed to compile software from the ports tree on a fresh install? Only through packages or through updating all software on the system, even if that changes my installation from 8.0-RELEASE to 8.0-STABLE/8.0-CURRENT? I guess I just don't get it. I don't get what the point is of even installing RELEASE or STABLE if you just have to update everything to CURRENT to even get any applications you want to use to compile on your system.



The ports tree is just a set of instructions on how to download source code, patch it for FreeBSD, compile it, and install it.

Each port will include instructions on how to patch things to work with each release of FreeBSD.  Thus, there's only 1 ports tree.  Everything needed is in there.

You can install FreeBSD 5.0, update the ports tree, and install software.  The ports tree will check if the app will work on FreeBSD 5.0, and either install it or error out.

You can install FreeBSD 6.2, update the ports tree, and install software.  The ports tree will check if the app will work on FreeBSD 6.2, and either install it or error out.

You can install FreeBSD 7.1, update the ports tree, and install software.  The ports tree will check if the app will work on FreeBSD 7.1, and either install it or error out.

You can install FreeBSD 8.0, update the ports tree, and install software.  The ports tree will check if the app will work on FreeBSD 8.0, and either install it or error out.

See how it works now?


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## ikbendeman (Dec 5, 2009)

Ok thank you for the last two replies. That makes sense to me now. I was installing the packages from RELEASE, hence why nothing could compile due to dependency hell. I tried running portupgrade -arR but all the gnome packages would fail due to dependency issues, and I kept trying to upgrade the packages they complained about with -rR and they would give the same errors. Anyways, I still need to read more about using portupgrade and all its arguments but thank you guys for being supportive and understanding. I guess I never read anywhere about the distinction between ports tree and the base system. (too used to linux!)


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## Beastie (Dec 5, 2009)

Another thing is to not confuse ports with packages, which I think is your case.
You can install everything using packages (pre-compiled ports) without any problem. All you have to do is get the packages from a single repository and not mix RELEASE packages with STABLE ones. Or you can just use ports.


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## ikbendeman (Dec 8, 2009)

how do I change my config to get the most up-to-date packages rather than the RELEASE packages? I'd rather compile but I wish there was a way to set all config options, then run the portupgrade -af (i think that's the command, to fetch all the files, but not to compile), so that way when i did run portupgrade i could let it go overnight without any manual intervention... well that and KDE4 is taking FOREVER to build on my laptop...


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## SirDice (Dec 8, 2009)

ikbendeman said:
			
		

> how do I change my config to get the most up-to-date packages rather than the RELEASE packages?


http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/ports-using.html
(Handbook is also available in Dutch if you prefer  )



> I'd rather compile but I wish there was a way to set all config options, then run the portupgrade -af (i think that's the command, to fetch all the files, but not to compile), so that way when i did run portupgrade i could let it go overnight without any manual intervention... well that and KDE4 is taking FOREVER to build on my laptop...



Have a look at ports-mgmt/portmaster. Running portmaster will do _all_ config options before starting to build.


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## ikbendeman (Dec 8, 2009)

thanks, another case of RTFM I guess... its just so much to read and retain all at once, I just switched over. I need to buy ink so I can have a hard copy of the handbook. After reading about portmaster I'm starting to wonder why anyone would use portupgrade... too bad I'm already in the middle of compiling KDE4 with portupgrade (STILL!)


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## ikbendeman (Dec 8, 2009)

and for the packages tree, I want up to date packages, so should I use 8.0 stable, 8.0 current, or 8.0 current packages trees for installing? aren't 8.0 current and 9.0 current packages the same?


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## SirDice (Dec 8, 2009)

There is no 8.0-CURRENT. -CURRENT is at this moment 9.0.

Choose -STABLE.


```
setenv PACKAGESITE ftp://ftp.nl.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/i386/packages-8-stable/Latest/
pkg_add -r gnome2-lite
```
This will add the latest gnome2-lite for 8.0 i386. Packages are always somewhat behind though. If I look at the server it still has gnome 2.26.

Stick to ports, it may take a while to get everything build but it'll be worth it.


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## phoenix (Dec 8, 2009)

ikbendeman said:
			
		

> and for the packages tree, I want up to date packages, so should I use 8.0 stable, 8.0 current, or 8.0 current packages trees for installing? aren't 8.0 current and 9.0 current packages the same?



You don't have to install a new OS version, just point the pkg_* tools to the -STABLE packages repository (as SirDice shows above).


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## ikbendeman (Dec 8, 2009)

thank you guys... and if I run portmaster -aftv will that only build ports that are out of date?


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## DutchDaemon (Dec 8, 2009)

No, the -f flag forces a build, whether the port is up-to-date or not.


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## Ruler2112 (Dec 8, 2009)

This is just a note from another linux user.  I *hated* the ports system when I first started using BSD.  Didn't understand it, didn't like it, thought it was overly-complex, did not like it one bit.  I've learned how it works and how to use it and now I love it.  No way would I ever want to go back to pre-compiled packages if I don't absolutely need to!  I use a script to run [cmd=]portversion -L =[/cmd] in /usr/local/etc/periodic/daily to notify me when a port is out of date, but no other port management tools, preferring to use make to do it myself.  I know it's frustrating as hell when you're starting to learn it, but trust me when I say it's worth it.  

The only thing I do not like about the ports system is that when a port is updated, no backup of the last version is kept anywhere.  If this were added to allow for easy down-grades if an update breaks something, it'd be about perfect IMO.  The make options can be set to tailor the compile to your specific machine, dependencies are chased for you, and upgrades are as easy as [cmd=]make;make deinstall;make reinstall;make clean[/cmd].  I was going grey trying to do stuff under Slackware/RedHat - update one piece of software and have to manually chase dependencies, hoping the version you need is available for your release version, dealing with multiple versions of binary packages, etc.  It was driving me crazy!!!  Unless needed for some specific piece of hardware, I don't think I'll use linux for another server...


Like I said, this really doesn't help with the problems you're having - just encouragement from somebody who's been where you are now.


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