Installing Software From mports

Note: The mports system is currently under development with a bunch of improvements that will make installing applications much easier. However, until the new mport system is working, the method below is the best way to install new applications to you system.

So you've got your freshly installed copy of MidnightBSD up and running, but now you want to install more applications than just the default. You'll first want to update your system's mport collection via CVS.

cd /usr/
sudo cvs -z 3 -d -P anoncvs@stargazer.midnightbsd.org:/home/cvs co mports

If asked for a password, use anoncvs .

-z 3 provides compression to speed up your downloads

-d will create new directories that have since been added on the server

-P prunes (removes) old directories that have been deleted

Now that your mports collection is up-to-date, browse the /usr/mports/ directory through all the categories to search for the application you want to install. Similarly, you can also use the find command to search for the programs you want, too. Here are a few examples:

Using find to locate a program

find /usr/mports/ -name "wget" -print

...

/usr/mports/ftp/wget

-name searches for file and directory names

"wget" is the search term you want. In this case, we searched for the program wget

-print will print out the path of any file that matches the search term

Installing wget

In the above example, we found the location of the program we want, so now we know where to go to in order to install it.

cd /usr/mports/ftp/wget/
sudo make install

Installing the bash shell

cd /usr/mports/shells/bash/
sudo make install


Installing Software From MirPorts