help with /cdrom

[Joshua Lokken]

* jim paw <glacius at linuxmail.org> [2004-03-31 15:33]:
> i'm on a freebsd computer at my home. I want to install some 
> ports from my desktop, not from sysinstall. When i go in the 
> xterm shell i type in /cdrom so it mounts the freebsd disk so i can 
> continue on installing my ports, but instead it says permission 
> denied. So i logged in as root and it still says permission Denied. 
> I don;t know what to do to fix this. I want to be able to do quick 
> installs from the cd instead of going into sysinstall all the time. 
> I use Kde as my xwindows. 


Ok, first off, I think you're confusing packages with the ports 
collection.  You can install binary packages from a FreeBSD CD-ROM
or any of the freebsd ftp mirrors out there.  The ports collection
is a collection of over 10,000 3rd party software skeleton
directories, listed under /usr/ports (if you have the ports collection
installed).  So, for example, if you wanted to install the popular
Mozilla web browser, you could do:

user% cd /usr/ports/www/mozilla
user% make install clean

That would instruct your machine to go out and fetch the source
tarball(s) for mozilla and all of it's dependencies, build the code,
and install it on your machine.  You can also pass specific parameters
to the make command for any special build flags you may want to use.

If you're trying to manage alot of software, or programs that require
amny dependencies (like KDE, for example), and you want to make sure
that you are running the latest versions of things, the ports
collection is definitely your friend.  You can get it by installing
the ports distribution from your FreeBSD CD-ROM, or by using cvsup.

All of this is laid out very nicely in the FreeBSD Handbook, which you
can find here:

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/index.html

And the specific sections on using packages and ports are at:

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/ports.html

And now on to your question about the cdrom drive...  as root, you
should be able to mount an IDE cdrom drive by doing:

root# mount_cd9660 /dev/acd0c /cdrom (if you're using FreeBSD 4.x)

The syntax may have changed slightly for FreeBSD 5.x, I'm not sure.

If you haven't made drastic changes to the default install, you should
be able to mount the CD-ROM drive (as root) by typing:

root# cdrom (I don't believe you need the leading slash).

I hope that some of this helps you, and good luck with FreeBSD!


-- 
Joshua

"Can you imagine how life could be improved if we could do away with
jealousy, greed, hate ..."

"It can also be improved by eliminating love, tenderness, sentiment --
the other side of the coin"
		-- Dr. Roger Corby and Kirk, "What are Little Girls Made Of?",
		   stardate 2712.4