Software installasion (Was: Re: Wine without X)

[Barnaby Scott]

Mel Flynn wrote:
> On Saturday 28 March 2009 13:06:44 Robert Huff wrote:
>> Mel Flynn writes:
>>>  > Can I ask one more possibly really dumb question, to which I
>>>  >  can find no answer: Is there a 'conventional', or sensible
>>>  >  for one reason oranother, place to download application source to?
>>>
>>>  Most systems I use or inherited use a variation of ~/src ~/cvs or
>>>  ~/svn, where src are the tarballs + their extracted source and
>>>  cvs/svn checkouts and/or exports.
>> 	I have never done this, but if I were running a private ports
>> tree I would be tempted to root it (if not on a separate partition)
>> at "/usr/priv_ports" or something similar and have the structure
>> minic /usr/ports whereever possible.  The name would then be
>> semi-intuitive, and a simple change of a few environment variables
>> (perhaps in the login file of an account dedicated to working on
>> those ports) would be all it took to change the framework.
> 
> A private portstree (as in: uses the ports framework for compiling and 
> installing software, including registering the port in /var/db/pkg) is best 
> kept in /usr/ports/local. One needs to set VALID_CATEGORIES=local in 
> /etc/make.conf and optionally add SUBDIR+=local in /usr/ports/Makefile.local 
> if one cares about the ports ending up in the INDEX and make search.
> 
> Ideally software not registering itself inside /var/db/pkg (as in software 
> compiled by hand) should NOT be installed in $LOCALBASE (/usr/local by 
> default) as there is no guarantee through the ports CONFLICTS mechanism, that 
> a port overwrites files installed by your hand-compiled software.
> 


Many thanks to all who have helped on this one.

I managed to get wine installed without X and it works :) However my
application doesn't :(

Most of the errors are concerned with MS Visual C++ libraries, which I
have unconfirmed indications might be solved with 'winetricks'
http://wiki.winehq.org/winetricks. However, I think using winetricks
means I need X anyway. So, I will leave it for now and try again after a
bit more research.

Thanks for all the ideas about where to download/install custom apps -
the one that appeals most at this stage is a jail, partly because I have
never played with them, and I think I should progress my learning in
that direction. However I find the other answers very useful insights
too. Given that winetricks calls itself a 'quick and dirty script',
along with the fact that the current wine port doesn't work, I think I
see another manual installation coming on.