[kmon]

New to the bsd sceene and was wodering since I dont have access to a fast connection at home but do have one at work is there a way I could download the ports I want to install burn them to cd and then install them been checking around but everything so far requires internet access.

[bsdjunkie]

download the ports.tar.gz and put on cd. take home and extract to /usr/ports.

[bmw]

I'd suggest a couple of different ways:

Plan A:

On fast-access work machine, cd to the port you want and say "make fetch". That will grab the distribution file. Burn the files you grabbed from the dir /usr/ports/distfiles onto CD. Take home and copy into /usr/ports/distfiles on your home machine. cd into the desired port dir and say "make install". This method will work if you grabbed all the required distfiles; unhappily there may be some dependencies that you might miss.

Plan B:

On fast-access work machine, cd into desired port and say "make package". That will build and install the port on your fast-access machine and then create a complete package file from it. Grab that file from the port dir (eg: whatever.tgz) and take it to your home machine. There, just say "pkg_add whatever.tgz". This method should work if the two machines are similarly configured (same libraries, etc.).

[kmon]

Thanks for the support and patience you guys give one more question I have is the ports on the installation cd. When the port from the cd are installed and you try to make the port the system attemps to search for the source for the port from the net is this just with the cd or all ports if so is there a place to download the entire port with source or the source itself and extract it to the port directory. Hope this made sense!

[bmw]

Yes, it makes sense, but you wouldn't want to do it. :-)

Keep in mind that the so-called "ports" are nothing but the Makefile and patches necessary to build a given software package on BSD. It does not contain the actual source of the package. You can download a copy of the ports tree and install it on your system and that is a reasonable size. But if you tried to download the source distribution for every port in the tree, I imagine that it would be several terabytes!

On the other hand, the FreeBSD team rebuilds all the ports in the tree every so often in order to decide what's broken and needs to be culled, so it can be done.

If you do try to grab every port disti, you better be on a good fast link with no monthly quota! :-)