[Atlas]

I'm looking for a GUI front-end to the ports system. After trying out XFCE4, I am a total convert to FreeBSD on the desktop. I want to move my mom and dad to a BSD desktop, but I'd really like to give them a graphical front-end to allow them to install applications as easily (or very close to as easily) as the Lindows CNR system.

I used Barry a long, long time ago, but it's dependent on the bloat of KDE, so I'd like to avoid that if possible. Any other suggestions?

Thanks!

[nutznboltz]

Are you sure you want your parents to be able to add programs at will if you also want to avoid bloat? What's to keep them from accidently installing KDE because they wanted some cool app that had major KDE dependencies?


Thanks for pointing out to me that Barry exists. I hadn't seen it before.

The page for barry is here:

http://www.student.uni-oldenburg.de/frerich.raabe/barry/

[Atlas]

That's a good point, and not something I had fully considered. I'm still interested in a graphical front-end, but I might have to edit the refuse file accordingly. :)

[elmore]

Thanks for pointing out to me that Barry exists. I hadn't seen it before.

Ditto for me as well. I had never heard of this before.

[draconius]

another person to check it out here, heh I have wanted something to make BSD easy for the parents to use if they want stuff to install...they dont quite get the 'make all install distclean' bit yet :p

[Strog]

I ran across some other options besides barry(QT) today and thought I would pass them along. I found portsman (http://www.meowfishies.com/portsman.rhtml)(GTK) on freshmeat while looking for something else and it linked to pib (http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/ports/sysutils/pib/)(tk) as another similar product. Pib is in ports. There's already a portsman (http://portsman.berlios.de/) (curses) in ports but it's a different app altogether.

Pib isn't really for mom and dad but I do like how it shows all the deps for a port and has a distfile browser so you can look at what's missing, current or orphaned. Nice for someone that knows what they want.

The curses based portsman seems nice enough for a sysadmin but the graphical portsman might just be good enough for mom and dad. It's very slick and might be just the ticket for a "pruned" ports tree.

http://www.meowfishies.com/img/portsman/portsman-install.png

[draconius]

I just saw this link on daemonnews this morning, I have not had the chance to test it out or anything like that yet, but I thought that I would put it up here :)
http://www.meowfishies.com/bpm.rhtml

I will play w/ it later!
<edit>
I see now that this is the exact same software strog posted above!
whoops!
</edit>