no /usr/ports directory

[Nikolas Britton]

Imobach González Sosa wrote:

>On Saturday 05 February 2005 10:38, Aryan Ameri wrote:
>  
>
>>Hi there,
>>
>>New to FreeBSD and this is my first message to a BSD mailing list. Hope
>>to learn a lot from you guys.
>>
>>I am reading the Handbook and chapter 4 which deals with packages and
>>ports repeatedly refers to the /usr/ports directory. The problem is
>>that I don't have this directory on my system. I am using FreeBSD 5.3
>>on a x86 machine. A simple google and browing the archives of this list
>>didn't bear much fruit. Have I missed something during the
>>installation?
>>    
>>
>
>Ok, it happens because you didn't tell sysinstall to install the ports 
>collection. You could:
>
>1) go into sysinstall and choose "ports" from Configure->Distributions. If you 
>got a FreeBSD CD, it install the ports from it. This step is optional, but 
>could save you some time.
>
>2) cvsup -L2 -g -h A-MIRROR-NEAR-YOU /usr/share/examples/cvsup/ports-supfile
>This second step will upgraded your ports collection (or will create it if you 
>didn't follow the step 1).
>  
>
Use option 2 as a method of last resort for "creating" the ports system 
on your computer. It's taxing on the servers and is generally the 
slowest way you can create the ports system, my uncompressed ports tree 
is 400MB  (excluding ./distfiles).  Also there is another method listed 
in Michael Lucas's Absolute BSD book, a good book for a newbie to 
pickup, also pickup The Complete FreeBSD (4th Ed.) by Greg 'groggy' 
Lehey and then when your an expert newbie (?, lol) pickup a copy of Unix 
Power Tools (3rd Ed.) published by O'Reilly.