Re: Some more questions on FreeBsd usage
From: Lowell Gilbert (lgusenet_at_be-well.ilk.org)
Date: 11/26/03
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Date: Wed, 26 Nov 2003 21:50:57 GMT
hannibal@videocam.net.au (hannibal) writes:
> I have installed Mplayer from the ports. Do you know how can I start
> it with a gui (I installed it with Gui support)? I don't like using
> mplayer with it's CLI interface.
According to /usr/ports/multimedia/mplayer/Makefile,
the GUI is called "gmplayer".
> Also I want to add OpenOffice and Gimp to my BSD from the packages
> (I'm on dialup and using the ports is very slow and costly for me). Is
> OpenOffice and Gimp on the FreeBsd 4.9 release disks (the 2 iso's)?
I don't think either is on the first disk. The second disk doesn't
have any packages; I seem to recall that it's a fixit disk or at least
a live filesystem of some flavor.
> Will it work if I put the first cd and do: pkg_add -r openoffice?
No, '-r' is the 'remote' fetching feature. If the package is on the
disk, then you can mount the disk and run pkg_add directly on the
package. If the package isn't on there, nothing you can do will get
it to build from there.
> Also, from an unknown reason my cd-writer doesn't want to burn cd's
> under WinXp anymore (I'm using Nero for this job). Is there a program
> for BSD equivalent to Nero Burning Rom? What do you reccomend me?
If your writer is ATAPI, then burncd(8) in the base system will do the
job. If the drive is SCSI, then install cdrecord from the ports. If
your Windows program is mysteriously failing, though, you may have
hardware problems.
> My conclusion so far on FreeBsd is that it's an amazing OS, capable of
> many things but it's not intended for someone who has a dial-up
> connection. It's simply a pain to install all those ports. Someone
> should put an iso image online with all the ports so we don't have to
> install them from the net everytime.
A lot of people run it just fine from dial-up connections. But if a
program is hundreds of megabytes, it's going to require you to
download that much. Downloading an ISO file (which would be tens of
gigabytes large, so you wouldn't be able to burn it to any currently
existing medium anyway) just means you get to download it in one lump
with lots of other packages as well.
Whether you download the source (for the port) or the pre-compiled
package doesn't matter a whole lot, in many cases. They are usually
in the same neighborhood in terms of size (say, within a factor of
two). But if you're downloading these things, then you have to
download them -- FreeBSD has already done everything it can to shrink
them down.
The one thing you can work on is making sure that you make the most of
the time you spend online. When building a port, "make fetch-recursive"
will grab all the distfiles it needs before starting to actually
compile anything. This means you get full usage of your network link,
and can disconnect when the build begins.
If all of these hints still leave you with more downloading than you
want to do, you'll need a different way to get the data. Buying
CDROMs or having a friend with more bandwidth make one for you are
some obvious options.
Be well.
- Next message: Michel Talon: "Re: Some more questions on FreeBsd usage"
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