“PBIs have the advantage of being entirely self-contained. That means casual users won’t inadvertently overwrite existing libraries or files by installing and uninstalling applications. This article shows how to create your own PBI, using Digikam as an example of a rather complex package with many library dependencies. While most PBIs will be easier to generate, I want to demonstrate most of the gotchas you may run across when generating your own PBIs.” In addition, here is an article explaining how to get MS Office running via WINE on FreeBSD.
Dru Lavigne has always written useful articles. Creating PBIs can be very easy when the original package already includes most dependencies. This is the case for most Linux software that you can download from the vendors’web sites.
I noticed a small issue with this tutorial, on p.4: http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/bsd/2006/01/05/FreeBSD_Basics.html?page…
The name and web site aren’t the PBI creator’s but the original software developer’s name and web site.
Other than that, the MS Office/WINE on FreeBSD/PC-BSD is pretty cool. I think this will be less and less useful as OpenOffice.org is more and more mature these days. By the way, OpenOffice.org 2.0.1 is available for PC-BSD too: http://www.pbidir.com/packages.php?code=142
But this is a nice hack. I’d like to see IE/WINE for PC-BSD for testing purpose so that I’m sure my web site won’t break in IE.
How is ooo.org built for pc-bsd? I recently switched to ooo-build (2.0.1) which built with the following in pkgtools.conf:
‘editors/ooo-build’ => ‘-DWITH_KDE WITH_TTF_BYTECODE_ENABLED=1 WITH_MMX=1 -DWITHOUT_MOZILLA WITH_ICONS=KDE’,
It looks polished and it integrates very well into KDE desktop (crystal icons, desktop themes). Screenshot:
ftp://hatvani.unideb.hu/pub/personal/screenshots/ooo-build.png
I put up the packages for a friend of mine here, but I’m not sure if they are useful for everyone, because they are athlon-xp optimized (ooo-build itself I think disregards make.conf settings, but the dependencies don’t). The directory contains all the dependencies of ooo-build as well (created with pkg_create -R -b ooo-build).
ftp://hatvani.unideb.hu/pub/FreeBSD/athlon_xp_packages/openoffice/
I was always an admirer of pc-bsd and desktkopbsd as well. I think the two projects are not in direct competition, for DesktopBSD seems to be basically FreeBSD with a nice skin and easy installation. It aims at removing the first barrier from installing FreeBSD, but uses ports and default FreeBSD tools. PC-BSD on the other hand aims and desktop users who don’t want to dig deeper into the system.
Anyway, I’m quite comfortable with FreeBSD – but I’m not the target audience, I understand that. I have a spare partition for OS review purposes (currently inhabited by Kubuntu) – I may try it out someday
Seeing how KDE centric the project is (which is a good thing IMHO) I was wondering about a tighter cooperation between the KDE project and PC-BSD, afterall, PC-BSD is a good choice for showing off KDE and it’s portability, the fact that it runs very well on other unix systems besides Linux. Any thought on that? It might help porting efforts – right now kde@freebsd seems to be a one man show (Michael Nottebrock), but correct me if I’m wrong.
PC-BSD has become my first choice for turning old hardware into a usable desktop. The PBIs are so simple to use that anyone can do it after being shown how (maybe this tutorial will make more of them available).
Don’t know if I’ve just been lucky or what, but I’ve had good hardware support so far with it.
it doesn’t run on amd64…
Browser: w3m/0.5.1
> it doesn’t run on amd64…
Yes it does. I’m running PC-BSD on and64 both at home and at the office
Please consider the title of the post you are replying to, as it happens to be the first part of his sentance. Here it is all at once: “wine is cool, but it doesn’t run on amd64…”
He wasn’t saying PC-BSD doesn’t run on amd64
32bit Wine Binary, runs perfectly fine on my Athlon64, maybe it doesnt work with FreeBSD6.0-AMD64?
but that doesnt affect PC-BSD considering its 32bit only, atm.
PC-BSD runs like a champ on my test machine ( 900MHZ Duron 256Mb Ram.Everything works out of the box.Will give this project a go.
… and I’m already yesterday with PC-BSD !
Unfortunately Toshiba is not interested in its customers nor is ATi (as it is a centrino notebook + x600se)
I hate this world. What is so secret about hardware specs!? I mean if ATi is so interested in holding its industrial secrets secret, then push that commonly accessable parts as a ROM into the hardware. Insert two additional shadow-ROMs for the case that something goes wrong while writing (hehe – ROM and writing
) and the whole thing will work for the next 10 years.
I don’t understand this world …
As for PC-BSD: thumbs up! I know you’re reading here, guys and I know that PC-BSD is cool as all BSDs are. PC-BSD is the only very fast progressing desktop-BSD IMO, so it deserves special attention. Furtunately 0.6x worked on my secondary machine like a fly (as long as I had NVIDIA in it :/ )
Again: damn on you, ATi – you could have so many customers just for providing _______proper_user_friendly_drivers(TM)_______ for operating systems (no windows doesn’t count, it is a disk operating system, no more =) ).
Edited 2006-01-08 00:28
Isnt that what autopackage is for? Where is autopackage?