newbie to fbsd

RW list-freebsd-2004 at morbius.sent.com
Sun Sep 4 19:18:17 PDT 2005


On Tuesday 30 August 2005 13:01, Mario Carugno wrote:
> Hi there, i am now a Debian user, but curious about FreeBSD. Here are some
> questions:
>  * I don't have a fast internet connection, so i have to get the CDROM
> distribution. The question is:
> ALL packages found in http://www.freebsd.org/ports/index.html are included
> in the CDROMs, or they have only some of them ?

The basics are there: kde, gnome, firefox etc, but  Open-office and the 
majority of the ports are not. 

>  * What's the difference between 5.4 and 4.11 releases ? 

For your purposes you either want 5.4, or to wait for 6.0 in a few weeks.

>  Why 4.11 CDROM distribution have 4 CDs and the later 5.4 have only 2 CDs ?

The downloadable disks on the FreeBSD site are 2-disk sets for both 4.x and 
5.x. I'm not quite sure what the status of 4.x, 4 disks sets are - it may 
have been a one-off experiment.

As in Gentoo the best way to maintain a FreeBSD system is through building 
from source through the ports system. That's why FreeBSD doesn't come with a 
pile of package disks, unlike debian.

It's perfectly feasable to use the ports system or remote package fetching 
with dial-up, I did it myself for a year or so.


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