8 Next Steps

You should now have the tools you need to get around and edit files, so you can get everything up and running. There is a great deal of information in the FreeBSD handbook (which is probably on your hard drive) and FreeBSD's web site. A wide variety of packages and ports are on the CDROM as well as the web site. The handbook tells you more about how to use them (get the package if it exists, with pkg_add /cdrom/packages/All/packagename, where packagename is the filename of the package). The CDROM has lists of the packages and ports with brief descriptions in cdrom/packages/index, cdrom/packages/index.txt, and cdrom/ports/index, with fuller descriptions in /cdrom/ports/*/*/pkg/DESCR, where the *s represent subdirectories of kinds of programs and program names respectively.

If you find the handbook too sophisticated (what with lndir and all) on installing ports from the CDROM, here is what usually works:

Find the port you want, say kermit. There will be a directory for it on the CDROM. Copy the subdirectory to /usr/local (a good place for software you add that should be available to all users) with:

# cp -R /cdrom/ports/comm/kermit /usr/local

This should result in a /usr/local/kermit subdirectory that has all the files that the kermit subdirectory on the CDROM has.

Next, create the directory /usr/ports/distfiles if it does not already exist using mkdir. Now check /cdrom/ports/distfiles for a file with a name that indicates it is the port you want. Copy that file to /usr/ports/distfiles; in recent versions you can skip this step, as FreeBSD will do it for you. In the case of kermit, there is no distfile.

Then cd to the subdirectory of /usr/local/kermit that has the file Makefile. Type

# make all install

During this process the port will FTP to get any compressed files it needs that it did not find on the CDROM or in /usr/ports/distfiles. If you do not have your network running yet and there was no file for the port in /cdrom/ports/distfiles, you will have to get the distfile using another machine and copy it to /usr/ports/distfiles from a floppy or your DOS partition. Read Makefile (with cat or more or view) to find out where to go (the master distribution site) to get the file and what its name is. Its name will be truncated when downloaded to DOS, and after you get it into /usr/ports/distfiles you will have to rename it (with the mv command) to its original name so it can be found. (Use binary file transfers!) Then go back to /usr/local/kermit, find the directory with Makefile, and type make all install.

The other thing that happens when installing ports or packages is that some other program is needed. If the installation stops with a message “can't find unzip” or whatever, you might need to install the package or port for unzip before you continue.

Once it is installed type rehash to make FreeBSD reread the files in the path so it knows what is there. (If you get a lot of “path not found” messages when you use whereis or which, you might want to make additions to the list of directories in the path statement in .cshrc in your home directory. The path statement in UNIX® does the same kind of work it does in DOS, except the current directory is not (by default) in the path for security reasons; if the command you want is in the directory you are in, you need to type ./ before the command to make it work; no space after the slash.)

You might want to get the most recent version of Netscape® from their FTP site. (Netscape requires the X Window System.) There is now a FreeBSD version, so look around carefully. Just use gunzip filename and tar xvf filename on it, move the binary to /usr/local/bin or some other place binaries are kept, rehash, and then put the following lines in .cshrc in each user's home directory or (easier) in /etc/csh.cshrc, the system-wide csh start-up file:

setenv XKEYSYMDB /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/XKeysymDB
setenv XNLSPATH /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/nls

This assumes that the file XKeysymDB and the directory nls are in /usr/X11R6/lib/X11; if they are not, find them and put them there.

If you originally got Netscape as a port using the CDROM (or FTP), do not replace /usr/local/bin/netscape with the new netscape binary; this is just a shell script that sets up the environment variables for you. Instead rename the new binary to netscape.bin and replace the old binary, which is /usr/local/netscape/netscape.