Essential FreeBSD Ports

In the spirit of documenting my FreeBSD system administration practices, I thought I would mention the FreeBSD ports I install on every system -- regardless of function. In the future you may see some of these migrate into the base installation, as happening with Portsnap. Others are well-established but have stayed out of the base system for various reasons.

You can read a summary of many of these tools here as well.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Hi Richard!

Just wanted to to tell you that I also use the tools you mentioned on my FreeBSD machines (desktop and laptop). However, I use pkg_rmleaves instead of pkg_cutleaves. It has a nice ncurses menu from which you can select the packages. This thread also mentions sysutils/pkg_orphan which seems to eliminate some of the disadvantages of pkg_cutleaves. I haven't tried pkg-orphan myself, so I cannot comment on it. Perhaps you can try it out and make a comparison. :)
4:26 AM
Anonymous said…
Hi Richard,

First of all, thanks for sharing this with us. I use the first three tools and they are very helpful. It is worth noting though (as you did on previous posts) that, so far, security/freebsd-update relies AFAIK on Colin Percival's update.daemonology.net which only offers i386 binary updates so far. Its integration into the base system with the upcoming 6.2 release makes me believe that this is going to change. Until then, net/cvsup-without-gui is your friend and with the right SUP_* params in /etc/make.conf (shown in /usr/share/examples/etc/make.conf), a "make update" in /usr/src get you rolling in no time. Of course, one will still need to run {build,install}world and co.

Keep up the good posts flowing.
Saad.
4:12 PM
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