So I decided with my recent praise of Eric Raymond’s writings and my praise of FreeBSD that I ought to submerge myself more into using the operating system as a desktop … All machines don’t have a GUI installed, and I figured the AMD Sempron that I recently assembled would be a good machine to run this sort of environment on … I decided I would go with the Gnome desktop since that was what Brian Behlendorf said that he preferred … So I do a refresh of the ports tree to get all the latest and greatest ports and switch to the /usr/ports/x11/gnome2 directory and give it the ol’ make install clean … Well wouldn’t you know it, it failed? So then I tried from packages; pkg_add -r gnome2 and that seemed to work, but it didn’t … So what to do?
I then decided gnome sucked … What did Brian know anyway? and installed KDE from ports … Maybe I would have better luck there? Well, yes, after about 12 hours of compiling! I started it a little after 6pm last night, and it didn’t finish until around 7am the next morning … I don’t know exactly when, but that was when I woke up from my cat nap … There was a nice prompt sitting there indicating that we had finished …
I had been reading Eric Raymond’s online version of The Art of Unix Programming off and on during the compile … reading makes me tired … Eric also has a great text called How to Become a Hacker … Which reminded me of the Halloween Micro$oft Documents exposed to him and his making them public, and the reasons which OSI thought should remain on Eric’s own web site here … So yes, much compile time allowed for much more research into Unix Wars and the origins of computing as we know it today … I am still angry that I was playing with mainframes at the time … One of the things they mention in the Revolution OS movie is the ability to have a system like the one you work on at work, at home … I did have that, I was the only one to own a 80386 at the time and I was writing C programs on it … Thing is, it was a DOS environment, but I know now that it could have been a Unix environment … I could have learned all of this stuff much sooner … I am now playing catch up … Then again, I certainly have a much better product to work with now than I would have back then … I should also mention that HBO’s movie Pirates of the Silicon Valley influenced me as well …
So anyway, then came the latest X server from X.org … I fired it up and lo and behold I now had a KDE environment … I suited to taste and then decided I would install Firefox … 30 megs of source there and took about 30-45 minutes to compile … But there were inconsistencies … I had seen this in the gnome-session startup as well … So, something got screwed up when I went from trying to install gnome from ports and then from packages … dependent versions were out of synch, and this just wreaked havoc on the other programs that needed these libraries … So, I decided I should probably fix this, especially if I wanted to run Firefox … So, the gnome page over at FreeBSD had mentioned something about a gnome_update.sh script that would upgrade gnome properly … I got hold of that and have been playing with it ever since … Having it fail a couple times only to fix why it failed and fire it up again … It’s a very powerful script, of that there is no doubt … Finally getting through all the dependencies and having the script get through its first 3 stages, we are now on:
Stage 4 of 5: Rebuilding all GNOME applications, and everything that relies upon them. (The Big Update)
Note: this will take a LONG time (a bit longer than it took to build it all the first time …). If you’ve been planning a day trip, now would be a great time to take it.
So I think we’re in for another 12 hour compile? I think we’ve learned a valuable lesson here … Install it from the CD when you install FreeBSD, it’s much faster … Although, I could have blown away the machine and done that, I wouldn’t have the latest and greatest from ports, and I would have had to upgrade it eventually anyhow …
Incidentally, these compiles are running on the same machine that this site sits on running Apache … I have noticed no slow down in this site’s performance as a result of this machine compiling the crap out of these two huge applications … FreeBSD is the poop …