SOLVED - Installing source and ports?

1

Nomad comes standard without the ports collection and src installed. I assume this is to keep the image size down for use on a USB stick. Since I have installed Nomad to my laptop’s SSD, I am debating whether to install the ports tree and source.

It is not recommended to mix ports and packages, due to possible conflicting dependencies, so I can live without that, but I am considering installing source. Is there any reason not to? My BSD background is with vanilla FreeBSD, but I have always built with ports and source installed. Feels kinda weird not having them.

2

And vice versa: is there any reason to keep Octopkg and package system to tech-savvy CLI geeks on their desktop workstation? I guess NomadBSD ir created primarily for an average GUI user like me.

3

You have to use portsnap to download the FreeBSD source tree. Again, the FreeBSD handbook on Chapter 4. Installing Applications: Packages and Ports | FreeBSD Documentation Portal provides an excellent reference how to download and install the entire source tree with portsnap which is included in the base system… and yes, even on NomadBSD. For downloading the source tree, you have to utilize bsdconfig in the terminal.

4

Yes. I understand all that. I have been using FreeBSD for quite some time. My question was for the developers of NomadBSD as to whether there was any downside to installing source on Nomad. I recently upgraded to FreeBSD13-RC6 without any issues, so I’m guessing there’s no downside to installing source. I guess I’ll go ahead and install it.

Since I’m not getting any response from any of the dev team on any of my questions, I guess I’ll start treating it like plain old vanilla FreeBSD. If it breaks, I’ll just go back to FreeBSD and start over. Luckily this is my secondary laptop. No critical data on it yet.

5

@tthenrie Since NomadBSD is a heavily customized edition of FreeBSD on the frontend side of things (custom desktop as well as custom apps) with some internals of it changed to optimize it for plain desktop usage. Go ahead and treat it like plain vanilla FreeBSD and do whatever you feel to do on a system that is in the end FreeBSD actually.

6

Thanks for the response. The “heavily customized” part was my concern. So far, I’m not running into any problems, other than a couple of the custom apps not functioning correctly. In particular, I am not happy with feh, but without it the desktop does not function. I’m slowly working through all the little issues that will make my bsd laptop function as my daily driver laptop. It’s taking awhile, but so far, so good.

7

@tthenrie Regarding feh, you also could use nitrogen instead of feh, a little GUI program that lets you choose your desktop wallpapers from a directory of your choice. Just add the directory/-ies, set the right image scaling for you and enjoy your new desktop wallpaper. Nitrogen is what I used on my Openbox setups on my PCs and it works like a charm.

8

I may try that. Thanks for the info. My issue with feh is that, as the default image viewer, it doesn’t properly size images for viewing on my laptop. Ristreppo works perfectly out of the box. I need to figure out how to set Ristreppo as the default image viewer. I just haven’t been concerned enough with it to go through the settings.

9

By the way, I did install source and have not encountered any issues. I also upgraded to FreeBSD 13.1-RELEASE without issues.

I’ll mark this thread as SOLVED.

10

Portsnap is for downloading the ports tree, not FreeBSD source. FreeBSD Source code is installed through git. As I mentioned initially, installing the ports tree is only for those who wish to build applications from THEIR source (not freebsd source), and as NomadBSD utilizes packages, rather than ports, and as mixing ports and packages is highly discouraged due to dependency issues, on NomadBSD ports tree installation is probably not a good idea, particularly if you are running it on a USB stick, due to the additional space the ports tree will take up. If you are not experienced with FreeBSD and if you are running Nomad as your daily driver and not just experimenting, stick with packages, rather than building from ports and you won’t have any trouble.

I found that one application I needed to run on my NomadBSD install, which is installed on my laptop SSD as my daily driver, required FreeBSD Source to be installed, which was what inspired my original posted question.

11

Yeah I confused it, you got me really here. You’re right, portsnap is for downloading the ports tree, git or if youre still more old-fashioned svn or even svnlite would work too but I’m not sure if they work on the newer src releases of FreeBSD.

12

But in another tread I can see you’re using ZFS…!
So you can make snapshots or boot environments, before doing new things and experiments.
If anything doesn’t go as expected, you can just roll back to a healthy system before the experiment :+1:
That’s one of the many advantages of ZFS :wink:

13

While I have been using FreeBSD for awhile, I’m just scratching the surface on zfs. I need to do some more study on using its features. I sure like it better than btrfs!

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14

I wonder how BTRFS matches with the HAMMER(2) filesystem(s) from DragonflyBSD. And I also wonder how they stand a chance against ZFS.

15

Hierarchy and types of ZFS datasets are explained in the man bsdinstall(8) ZFS DATASETS. There are also ZFS environment variables described, too.

16

You could also utilize bsdconfig to install FreeBSD’s source afterwards.

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17

I just spent some time going through bsdconfig and could not find any means of installing FreeBSD source code. Would you provide a how-to, please? I installed src from Github to /usr/src but when I did the upgrade to 3.1-RELEASE, the updater could not find it and did not update my /usr/src files.