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FreeBSD Ports Tricks

Posted by michael on from the sit-up-and-beg dept.

BSD Forums writes "One of FreeBSD's biggest benefits is its ports collection. You can go years without learning more than just make install clean, but there are dozens of features built into the ports tools. OnLamp's Dru Lavigne demonstrates several of these tricks to simplify your life."

3 of 201 comments (clear)

  1. The feature I like most: by Krapangor · · Score: 5, Funny
    Zombiefication

    You just type e.g.:
    goat@blindeyes> make emacs --D UNDEAD=1
    And your installation of emacs is zombiefied. That means that an emacs process can never crash, is much stronger albeit slower and can only be killed by kill PID -SIGCUTINTOHALFWITHCHAINSAW.
    In fact I have a zombiefied apache running here for 742 days without any trouble. Although it eats sometimes other processes.

    So all you "*BSD is dead whiners": In fact the death of *BSD is a good thing. It has given the system many new occult powers of which a living system like Linux/MacOS X can only dream. With all these undead processes, vampiric servers and banshee IDS your system is much better than the boring old standard rubbish.
    I even heard some rumors from Redmond that MS is working on killing Windows, too. Just for gaining the great powers of an undead system.

    --
    Owner of a Mensa membership card.
  2. Re:Gee golly! by hackrobat · · Score: 5, Funny
    Ha ha! Reminds me of Linus' post in 1993, asked why Linux should be chosen over BSD:
    > Other than the fact Linux has a cool name, could someone explain why I
    > should use Linux over BSD?

    No. That's it. The cool name, that is. We worked very hard on
    creating a name that would appeal to the majority of people, and it
    certainly paid off: thousands of people are using linux just to be able
    to say "OS/2? Hah. I've got Linux. What a cool name". 386BSD made the
    mistake of putting a lot of numbers and weird abbreviations into the
    name, and is scaring away a lot of people just because it sounds too
    technical.
  3. Zealotry by Ari+Rahikkala · · Score: 5, Funny

    [to save Slashdot users' bandwidth, a reply about how Gentoo GNU/Linux does most of this stuff, too, and some of it (like making package repositories) in an easier way has been deleted from this space]