Chapter 7 User Applications

Please take a look at the ports page for info on software packages ported to FreeBSD. The list currently tops 9,200 and is growing daily, so come back to check often or subscribe to the freebsd-announce mailing list for periodic updates on new entries.

Most ports should work on the 4.X and 5.X branches. Each time a FreeBSD release is made, a snapshot of the ports tree at the time of release in also included in the ports/ directory.

We also support the concept of a ``package'', essentially no more than a gzipped binary distribution with a little extra intelligence embedded in it for doing whatever custom installation work is required. A package can be installed and uninstalled again easily without having to know the gory details of which files it includes.

Use the package installation menu in /stand/sysinstall (under the post-configuration menu item) or invoke the pkg_add(1) command on the specific package files you are interested in installing. Package files can usually be identified by their .tgz suffix and CDROM distribution people will have a packages/All directory on their CD which contains such files. They can also be downloaded over the net for various versions of FreeBSD at the following locations:

or your nearest local mirror site.

Note that all ports may not be available as packages since new ones are constantly being added. It is always a good idea to check back periodically to see which packages are available at the ftp.FreeBSD.org master site.

You do not have a math co-processor, right? You will need to add the alternative math emulator to your kernel; you do this by adding the following to your kernel config file and it will be compiled in.

options GPL_MATH_EMULATE

After installing the news/inn package or port, an excellent place to start is Dave Barr's INN Page where you will find the INN FAQ.

Use the Port, Luke! A pre-patched version of Apache, apache13-fp, is available in the ports tree.

Yes. Please see http://www.FreeBSD.org/java/.

If you are running a FreeBSD version that lags significantly behind -CURRENT or -STABLE, you may need a ports upgrade kit from http://www.FreeBSD.org/ports/. If you are up to date, then someone might have committed a change to the port which works for -CURRENT but which broke the port for -STABLE. Please submit a bug report on this with the send-pr(1) command, since the ports collection is supposed to work for both the -CURRENT and -STABLE branches.

a.out applications like Netscape Navigator require a.out libraries. A version of FreeBSD built with ELF libraries does not install them by default. You will get complaints about not having /usr/libexec/ld.so if this is the case on your system. These libraries are available as an add-on in the compat22 distribution. Use sysinstall(8) to install them. You can also install them from the FreeBSD source code:

# cd /usr/src/lib/compat/compat22
# make install clean

If you want to install the latest compat22 libraries whenever you run make world, edit /etc/make.conf to include COMPAT22=YES. Old compatibility libraries change rarely, if ever, so this is not generally needed.

Also see the ERRATAs for 3.1-RELEASE and 3.2-RELEASE.

FreeBSD does not include a port upgrading tool, but it does have some tools to make the upgrade process somewhat easier. You can also install additional tools to simplify port handling.

The pkg_version(1) command can generate a script that will update installed ports to the latest version in the ports tree.

# pkg_version -c > /tmp/myscript

The output script must be edited by hand before you use it. Recent versions of pkg_version(1) force this by inserting an exit(1) at the beginning of the script.

You should save the output of the script, as it will note packages that depend on the one that has been updated. These may or may not need to be updated as well. The usual case where they need to be updated is that a shared library has changed version numbers, so the ports that used that library need to be rebuilt to use the new version.

If you have the disk space, you can use the portupgrade tool to automate all of this. portupgrade includes various tools to simplify package handling. It is available under sysutils/portupgrade. Since it is written in Ruby, portupgrade is an unlikely candidate for integration with the main FreeBSD tree. That should not stop anyone from using it, however.

If your system is up full time, the periodic(8) system can be used to generate a weekly list of ports that might need updating by setting weekly_status_pkg_enable="YES" in /etc/periodic.conf.

Because POSIX says that there shall be such a shell.

The more complicated answer: many people need to write shell scripts which will be portable across many systems. That is why POSIX specifies the shell and utility commands in great detail. Most scripts are written in Bourne shell, and because several important programming interfaces (make(1), system(3), popen(3), and analogues in higher-level scripting languages like Perl and Tcl) are specified to use the Bourne shell to interpret commands. Because the Bourne shell is so often and widely used, it is important for it to be quick to start, be deterministic in its behavior, and have a small memory footprint.

The existing implementation is our best effort at meeting as many of these requirements simultaneously as we can. In order to keep /bin/sh small, we have not provided many of the convenience features that other shells have. That is why the Ports Collection includes more featureful shells like bash, scsh, tcsh, and zsh. (You can compare for yourself the memory utilization of all these shells by looking at the ``VSZ'' and ``RSS'' columns in a ps -u listing.)

The usual answer is that DNS on your system is misconfigured. Both Netscape and Opera perform DNS checks when starting up. The browser will not appear on your desktop until the program either gets a response or determines that the system has no network connection.

If you only update parts of the Ports Collection, using one of its CVSup subcollections and not the ports-all CVSup collection, you should always update the ports-base subcollection too! The reasons are described in the Handbook.

To create audio CDs from MIDI files, first install audio/timidity++ from ports then install manually the GUS patches set by Eric A. Welsh, available at http://www.stardate.bc.ca/eawpatches/html/default.htm. After timidity++ has been installed properly, midi files may be converted to wav's with the following command line:

% timidity -Ow -s 44100 -o /tmp/juke/01.wav 01.mid

The wav files can then be converted to other formats or burned onto audio CDs, as described in the FreeBSD Handbook.