Questions from a Linux refugee

[Polytropon]

On Tue, 6 Jan 2015 11:55:03 +0100, Lev wrote:
> 1. Lack of ext4 support. As a Linux user, I have lots of disks with ext4
> partition, and I simply wanted to copy files, but failed. I might be naive,
> but ext4 is open, so why can't FreeBSD have native support for ext4?

Because of the amount of available file systems especially
in Linux (more than 5), having them supported along with
the operating system (!) is not FreeBSD's way to go. Instead
you can find support in 3rd party software: The ports collection
contains fuse which allows you to access many kinds of different
file systems.

To mount an ext4 partition, install sysutils/fusefs-ext4fuse
and load the fuse.ko kernel module. Then you should be able
to perform the mount operation:

	# ext4fuse /dev/da0s1 /mnt

It's probably a good idea to add "-o ro" if you just want to
copy files _from_ the ext4 partition.

The OS itself has just a limited support for foreign file
systems. FUSE is the right tool if you need that.



> 3. Package system. I wanted to install scilab. There is (?) no binary package
> for it, and the compilation took ages. After I had it, the next update deleted
> it along with other packages. How to deal with the upgrades?

Read the primer on pkg, if you want to use binary packages.
I think scilab should have one available.

https://wiki.freebsd.org/PkgPrimer

https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/pkgng-intro.html



More detailed info:

https://wiki.freebsd.org/pkgng

https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=pkg&sektion=7




55! from JO52TD :-)



-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...