Date: Tue, 10 Oct 2006 22:10:55 -0500 From: cothrige <cothrige@bellsouth.net> To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Getting started with FreeBSD Message-ID: <20061011031055.GA81430@celephais.home.net>
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I am a complete newb to BSD trying to get started learning a bit about how to make my way in it. I have been using Slackware over the last four years or so, and this has made me a bit used to one way of doing things and now the FreeBSD way is kind of rattling me. For some background, I installed from the FreeBSD 6.1-RELEASE discs, and this is also what I get from uname -r. What I don't understand is the relationship between ports, packages and security. For instance, I am currently using firefox 1.5.0.1, which I keep seeing online is not terribly secure. However, I am confused about what FreeBSD makes available to update this and other similar packages. I installed this, and most of the rest of the system, from the discs via packages, and hope to keep packages as my main method. I have had some experience in the past with twenty hour compiles of kdelibs on Gentoo and really don't want that again but I cannot find any info anywhere on how to approach updating for security via packages. I installed once previously as a test, and in that system followed the only online information I could find which seemed relevant, and that was regarding cvsup. I backed up the ports directory and setup a supfile according the handbook and a couple of examples, and went ahead and ran it. From there I started checking how things would go if I ran portupgrade on a couple of apps. I chose the infamous kdelibs as my sample. When I ran portupgrade -P, just to check things out and see what I would get, it failed to find a package and started grabbing the source. No, couldn't do that, so I killed it. I then tried again with portsnap and got the same result. When I looked at the complaint I found that it was looking for what appeared to be a nonexistent file. I am not sure now, but it was something like kdelibs-3.5.4 and the server it was searching on, something which ended in ...packages-6.1-release I think, had only kdelibs-3.5.1. As a matter of fact, I went through all the directories I could find online (including 6 and 7 stable, release and current) and was unable to find the package my system was looking for in any of them. This failure, and the confusion which ensued, are what cause me to wonder just how to keep things like the aforementioned firefox up to date. I am now in a situation where I am unsure of what to do as regards updates, and can really find nothing which clarifies things much online. Everything I find says to run cvsup and use a supfile entirely like that which I used before, and that did not work out. How do I use new, more secure ports and yet still be able to use binary packages? Is updating ports with cvsup the only way? And if so, what did I do wrong before? The inability to use binary packages for giant, though in my case needed, bloatware like kde made me leave Gentoo behind and I want to know whether that is the only future for FreeBSD too. I am assuming that since there are binary packages online for these files they must be usable, I just don't know how to get to them from tools like portupgrade. Or if that is how you even try to upgrade a system from packages. I just can't find any really relevant guides for this type of thing, so I am supposing that everyone just compiles everything. Any help in this is very much appreciated, and sorry if I am overlooking super obvious information somewhere about this. I probably am, but I just can't find it. Patrick
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