Package Management with Ports and pkg_* in FreeBSD
Monday, September 1st, 2008
I just started using FreeBSD. The part that I was most interested in is its package management. I’ve come from the land of Linux… Gentoo (portage: based on ports), Arch Linux (pacman: i686 binary package manager), all the rpm based systems, and Debian’s package management concoction. Portage and pacman have won me over and after a day of working with FreeBSD there is room for a little ports in my life. This is my cheat sheet for getting started with ports and FreeBSD package management. I obtained most of this information from the FreeBSD documentation on Installing Applications: Packages and Ports.