Please take a look at for info on software packages ported to FreeBSD. The list currently tops 1800 and is growing daily, so come back to check often or subscribe to the for periodic updates on new entries.

Most ports should be available for the 2.2, 3.x and 4.0 branches, and many of them should work on 2.1.x systems as well. Each time a FreeBSD release is made, a snapshot of the ports tree at the time of release in also included in the ports/ directory.

We also support the concept of a ``package'', essentially no more than a gzipped binary distribution with a little extra intelligence embedded in it for doing whatever custom installation work is required. A package can be installed and uninstalled again easily without having to know the gory details of which files it includes.

Use the package installation menu in /stand/sysinstall (under the post-configuration menu item) or invoke the pkg_add(1) command on the specific package files you're interested in installing. Package files can usually be identified by their .tgz suffix and CDROM distribution people will have a packages/All directory on their CD which contains such files. They can also be downloaded over the net for various versions of FreeBSD at the following locations: for 2.2.8-release/2.2.8-stable for 4.0-current

or your nearest local mirror site.

Note that all ports may not be available as packages since new ones are constantly being added. It is always a good idea to check back periodically to see which packages are available at the master site. Where do I find libc.so.3.0?

You are trying to run a package for 2.2/3.x/4.0 on a 2.1.x system. Please take a look at the previous section and get the correct port/package for your system. ghostscript gives lots of errors with my 386/486SX.

You don't have a math co-processor, right? You will need to add the alternative math emulator to your kernel; you do this by adding the following to your kernel config file and it will be compiled in. options GPL_MATH_EMULATE

When I run a SCO/iBCS2 application, it bombs on

You first need to edit the /etc/sysconfig (or ) file in the last section to change the following variable to # Set to YES if you want ibcs2 (SCO) emulation loaded at startup ibcs2=NO

It will load the kernel module at startup.

You'll then need to set up /compat/ibcs2/dev to look like: lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 9 Oct 15 22:20 X0R@ -> /dev/null lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 7 Oct 15 22:20 nfsd@ -> socksys -rw-rw-r-- 1 root wheel 0 Oct 28 12:02 null lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 9 Oct 15 22:20 socksys@ -> /dev/null crw-rw-rw- 1 root wheel 41, 1 Oct 15 22:14 spx

You just need socksys to go to to fake the open & close. The code in -current will handle the rest. This is much cleaner than the way it was done before. If you want the How do I configure INN (Internet News) for my machine?

After installing the inn package or port, an excellent place to start is where you'll find the INN FAQ. What version of Microsoft FrontPage should I get?

Use the Port, Luke! A pre-patched version of Apache is available in the ports tree.