Hacker News Reader

Comment by rbanffy | Hacker News Reader

Does FreeBSD have something like Synaptic?

FreeBSD setups typically use the BSD Ports collection for package management, which compiles from source + patches (vaguely similar to Gentoo Linux).

There doesn't appear to be a mainstream UI for BSD ports.

(Curiously, the Mac OS X equivalent, MacPorts, has at least two current UI projects.)

To append to what your are saying this is because ports is set up for unix people to work it.

To search you use ls, cd, and find. To install you "cd <dir> && make install".

If you are installing freebsd you should already be comfortable enough to not need a pretty gui hiding these very simple details.

You could use find, but it is easier to use the built in facilities to search for ports. If you are in the ports directory you can:

make search name=name_of_port

to search for a port by name and:

make search key=key_to_search_for

to search by key. You can also use quicksearch instead of search to reduce the verbosity of the results. If you read the ports man page, you will find a bunch of other nifty things you can do with the ports system.

I tend to just search at http://www.freebsd.org/ports/

FreeBSD also has a binary package management system, see http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/books/handbook/packages-using..... The ports take precedence, though, in that they can have newer versions and not all packages on all architectures may be available as binaries.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com