The FreeBSD Ports Collection

[Samy Al Bahra <samy at kerneled dot com>]

A lot of people have been asking me where and why is the new Arabeyes
FreeBSD ports collection project useful. "The FreeBSD Ports and Packages
Collection offers a simple way for users and administrators to install
applications". The ports system is a source-based system that
automatically downloads, compiles and installs the source code for a
user's selected application. It is on this system that the BSDs' binary
packages are built on.

For example, let's say I want to install the new version of
MozillaFireBird, installing it from source is simple as changing
directories to /usr/ports/www/mozilla-firebird and doing a 'make
install'. I can build a package by doing a 'make package'. I can search
ports by doing 'make search key=...' or 'make search name=...', etc... A
package's installation is simple as pkg_add <package>. The functionality
in ports is quite large but all in good faith.

So, what does an Arabic ports category mean for Arab FreeBSD users? It
means you can consider Arabic an "officially" supported language by
FreeBSD. From this category users can automatically download and install
the latest version of Arabic fonts or automatically download and install
the latest version of duali and for the FreeBSD developers and Arabeyes,
we can build packages for users to be included in the many FreeBSD CDs
out there (BSDMall, FreeBSDShop, etc...).

I urge all FreeBSD users to look at the project's
(http://www.arabeyes.org) CVS repository and start helping us out by
trying out the ports, testing them and submitting patches if necessary.
A lot more ports are coming in to this category and reliability is
promised.

Please look at the Arabic FreeBSD ports collection page for more
information (the arabeyes.org page that is).
 
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| Samy Al Bahra | samy at kerneled dot com |
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|     0983 956D 1F4A AA54 47CB      |
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|     http://www.kerneled.com       |
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