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Yes, it's easy. But can take a lot of time. Binary packages isn't necessary, but it's more than convenient.

I have a machine with a Celeron 766 MHz with 128 MB RAM I like too much. It's more than convenient to run a GUI with Firefox 3.x, but it's slow enought to take ages to compile it. Actually it takes ages even on better machines I have here.

I don't like OpenOffice, nor I do use, but have you tried to compile it?

NetBSD support lots, including some very slow, architectures. I used to do a lot of things sometime ago in a Quadra 650, 68040 33MHz with 32 MB RAM. Like the first example, it can do a lot of work very well, but take days if you want to compile even the simpliest packages.

This is not the point. I know I can have a better machine for a very low price. But in a architecture supposed to run on lots of embedded devices, don't you think having binary packages matter?

What is your point? If you need binary packages they're all here for NetBSD-4.0 and all the architectures that NetBSD runs on

ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/packages/NetBSD-4.0/

There aren't any packages for NetBSD-5 yet, it was released just a few weeks ago.

So if you run NetBSD-4.0 on i386 architecture and you want to install Firefox3 from NetBSD's repository of binary packages, then all you have to do:

# export PKG_PATH="ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/packages/NetBSD-4.0/i386/All;ftp:/...
# pkg_add firefox3

Sparc Solaris binary packages are at:

ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/packages/SunOS/sparc/5.9_2008Q3/Al...

I don't understand why people are moaning about building packages from source. Pkgsrc automates everything for you, i.e. it downloads the sources, checks the checksums, builds and installs the packages. All you have to do is go to package's directory and type 'make package'.

I run very old Sun Ultra 10 that has 440MHz UltraSparc IIi CPU. I always build my own packages from source. I've built large packages like kde3, koffice, firefox3, gimp, etc. on this very machine. Yes it does takes a few days to build kde3, but I don't mind waiting, I just leave the machine running all day and night for a few days or so, untill all the packages are done. Right now I'm building complete kde-4.2.3 to see how it works on this slow machine. So what if it takes 2-3 days to build the package, the world is not gonna end by this time...

Its not hard at all to build the packages especially in my own chrooted enviroment + pkg-chk + pkg_tarup and other tools, but 'you sound like' you're attempting to cover up the statement "there are binary packages for NetBSD and a few other OSes like Solaris and QNX."