thelinuxlink.net

Well, I got the bug after the show 2 weeks ago, and so far, I've really been digging FreeBSD 6.2, but it's a *lot*different than what I'm used to. I've got kde installed, and most of my favorite "must have" apps as well, but I'm really pretty lost. I've been reading the Handbook, which seems like a great Tome, but I'm having a hard time finding quick answers in some cases. I guess my first few answers would be:

Package management - is there any command like "apt-cache show" or "pacman -Ss"? pkg_add -r works to grab stuff easily enough, but I cannot figure out how to query a remote server for what packages and versions are available.

Ports - where is a good how-to? It seems pretty similar to ABS, but I'm lost as to the best way to work with it.

IMO, the Handbook really just glosses over these two questions - maybe I was looking in the wrong place?

Heh, I've been hitting FreeBSD and OpenBSD pretty hard over the past several weeks. Great stuff.

Use the "whereis" command to find any packages you are looking for.

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO885 ... tions.html

Here are some good resources, besides the Handbook (which really does cover just about everything):

http://www.engr.colostate.edu/~reinholz ... eebsd.html
http://www.lemis.com/grog/Documentation/CFBSD/
http://www.bsdforums.org/forums/

Back to packages and ports, I recommend you install:

portsnap - for quicky updating your ports tree
portmaster - for finding out which packages/ports need updating
portaudit - performs security checks on your ports and lets you know which ones have security vulnerabilities.

Great stuff, you have seen the light

As chess says , whereis Octave would show you the directory of the port for Octave , the closest thing to a free mathlab. Then you can cd to that directory, run make install clean && pkgdb -F (that updates the database)
There is actually a package for Octave so , pkg_add -r octave will do.

run portsnap fetch update ,every so often to update the ports tree && portaudit -F ,which prevents some ports from installing basically , it is a security advisor , so well worth it.

The first time you run portsnap you have to run it like so, portsnap fetch extract then just do the above.

portupgrade is the tool i use to automate upgrading ports and packages.

Its basically portupgrade -ai , which goes through all the ports but prompts you if you want to upgrade the port , if you just use -a , it will just upgrade the port , bare in mind quite often you get an option screen when upgrading ports, i believe there is a way to automate that, but the first time its worth having the experience of manually selecting them.
portupgrade -aPP , will just upgrade the ports to packages , if you just have -ap it will look for a package , if not it will compile the port.. if you do portupgrade -aiPP , for some silly reason it downloads the package then asks if you want to upgrade it , instead of asking , then downloading.

The is a tool which is part of portupgrade that allows you to install ports if you don;t like the whereis cd .. approach, ive not used it but, man portupgrade should help you.

When it comes to upgrading Freebsd, if you find the handbook too much, follow this guide :-

http://www.engr.colostate.edu/~reinholz ... eebsd.html
scroll down and your see Miscellaneous and upgrading is there.

The better BSD forum is forums.bsdnexus.com , bsdforums.org has left the BSD spirit along time ago, its a commercial money-grabbing organisation now, that not only uses a closed source BB but does not like posting of external tutorials on its forum.

For the church of BSD goto :-

http://www.unixprogram.com/churchofbsd/

We are not a Satanic Cult Although we may be a cult, this has yet to be determined

Have fun with FreeBSD