On Wednesday 08 April 2009 21:24:00 Bob Johnson wrote: > PC-BSD seems to already keep up-to-date binary packages of their > applications. Do they accomplish that by only offering a small subset > of the full ports collection?
Yes - have a look at <http://www.pbidir.com/>. I installed PC-BSD on a spare machine to investigate it. The first three ports/metaports I tried to install after completing the base setup were emacs, TeTeX and the Psi Jabber/XMPP client. None of those was available, and after seeing how few prebuilt packages there were in all categories, I gave up. My personal view is that PC-BSD gives the end user an impressive and reasonably slick computer-as-appliance with some ability to customise and still stay ``on the path''. For people who need that, PC-BSD is what they need. My feeling, though, is that anyone who finds themselves wanting to install a bunch of stuff from outside the PBI system (in other words, from ports, which are still there under the hood of PC-BSD) will soon want to switch to mainstream FreeBSD. As such PC-BSD has the potential to be an effective ``gateway drug''(!) Jonathan _______________________________________________ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org"
