“I would really like to be able to play with OpenBSD’s PF, or FreeBSD’s jail, but I’m rather fond of Gentoo and portage. Right now anybody wanting to play with portage on a BSD has a lot of work to do before getting started, since we don’t have stage-1 tarballs. I still don’t have a stage-1, but this text and attendent files comprises a small start along the road to generating one.” Read the instructions here.
Gentoo Goes BSD
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSAlert.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Cool
Pity that NetBSD isn’t supported – given that pkgsrc (what the other BSDs call ports) is itself portable to other operating systems, one could have a NetBSD with emerge and a Linux with pkgsrc…
Not that I think this would be particularly useful (although pkgsrc’s portability can really be, for example on Solaris – it simply contains more stuff than more “native” alternatives like pkg-get and http://www.blastwave.org/ ). The point of ports/pkgsrc is, after all, to make unportable stuff written be people who think that all the world is running Linux work on BSD, and somehow I doubt that emerge will contain such patches.
Please correct me if im wrong, but doesnt bsd have a ports system which is what portage is based upon. What is the motivation of porting the portage system to bsd, if you get my meaning. What are you gaining?
Great stuff!
Just by way of comparison, Debian has had some *BSD ports underway for quite some time.
The OpenBSD port appears to have died in its nascent stages due to lack of interest, but the FreeBSD (http://www.debian.org/ports/freebsd/) and NetBSD (http://www.debian.org/ports/netbsd/) ports are progressing nicely.
Portage is not based on Ports, merely inspired by…
But I agree — this is rather pointless. FreeBSD ports are far more polished and reliable than portage, and OpenBSD machines tend to be dedicated to something other than desktop use.
I view the pkgsrc and Debian projects as different beasts. Pkgsrc’s move to other platforms, well, it provides software to platforms which don’t have much to choose from. Motta mentioned Solaris, MacOSX and GNU/Hurd (not officially supported, but works) are two others.
Debian’s FreeBSD and NetBSD projects are different — they seek to have an entire Debian GNU system running on top of a different kernel, complete with dpkg, sysv-style management, etc. etc.
That doesn’t sound like the goal here, rather, it’s another Gentoo troll trying to show that he’s uberleet by getting what is a pretty standard unix app running on another unix. When they get the GNU/Hurd port finished, or the system will build itself, this might be worth paying attention to. Until that time….
> But I agree — this is rather pointless. FreeBSD ports are
> far more polished and reliable than portage, and OpenBSD
> machines tend to be dedicated to something other than
> desktop use.
Original article mentions PF and jail, which are not for desktop use
Worst portage ever.
I’ve been waiting for something like this for soo long
and now lets port portage to windows. i don’t know why as it makes no sense, but neither does the above.
When I want to play with features from other OSes I usually just set up the Bochs emulation enviroment and setup the required OS in that. If you’ve got the cash you could splash out on VMware. This means I can work within my existing gentoo setup where everything is setup to my needs, rather than setting up yet another unix like system to full desktop spec (can take ages).
I’ve heard some talk about plex86 as well which is similar to VMWare because it is x86 virtulisation (much faster than Bochs), haven’t tried it tho.
Anyway, I suppose you should carry on with your effort even if it isn’t actually the best way of reaching your goal, after all, the ethos of being a hacker is doing stuff because you can, right
?
“Anyway, I suppose you should carry on with your effort even if it isn’t actually the best way of reaching your goal”
Actually, Bochs emulation has a pretty high (read: huge) overhead. VMWare is far, far better in this regard, but as you point out, it’s far from Free or even inexpensive. Plex86 in its original form was a complete and utter failure, and has been completely rewritten to function as an accelerator for Bochs instead. Once (if?) this is fully sorted and all the chinks have been beaten out, Bochs will probably be a good solution, but it’s not there yet.
“rather than setting up yet another unix like system to full desktop spec (can take ages)”
I find this takes no time at all. Make sure to back up your /home partition first (okay, and stuff like /etc/XF86Config-4 as well if you like) then just reinstall all your apps and they’ll read the config from their dotfiles in your user’s home directory. Pretty painless, and it’s not as if you’ll be doing it too often, anyway. YMMV though I guess.
Despite all the negative feedback i’d like to say thanks for your work and thanks for sharing:)
Wow, All else fails….Change operating systems at the command prompt.
Step #1: Install Gentoo
(compile)
Step #2: run “vim”
Step #3: emerge -e (Something)BSD
(more compile)
Step #4: run “vim” and notice the diference
I think I’ll stick with the good old ports collection thankyou. It’s a little bit more mature than portage, and works more often.
for what it’s worth i’ve never had anything fail in portage. dunno what your major malfunction is.
Heh. The relative immaturity of Gentoo (and specifically portage) is the malfunction. But hey, it’s better than RPMs right? Seriously though, all the people I know that either use both Linux and BSD or have used both Linux and BSD have had more issues with Linux than they have with BSD.
Hey, why don’t we port BSD-portage back to Linux for the next step? Then we can turn around and port that to BSD! Wow!
For sure portage has been great for me too no problems here’s, but yeah FreeBSD’s ports are awesome too no doubt.