Help with BSD packages

[Eva_Unit_0]

Alright so I've always been a linux guy (Gentoo being my distro of choice) but in typical fashion I've gotten bored and want something new to play with. So I've been messing with freebsd recently but I've come across a snag. I'm sure it's easy to fix but I'm just not sure how to go about doing it.

I've had to run freebsd 4.10 on my thinkpad 600e because on anything after 5.0 the pcmcia is inexplicably broken on these laptops. That's fine...it installs great, everything works (including my prism2 wireless). But I have a problem with the packages system. FreeBSD 4.10 is technically in the archives list and so whenever I try to use pkg_add it simply reports that it can't find the directiory for 4.10-RELEASE and bails out. Does anyone know how to change the default URL that pkg_add checks (so I can point it directly to the archive mirror), or perhaps I could change the directory it looks for and just have it use the 5.4 or 6.0 package directory?

I know I could manually install everything...but if that's the best I can do, I'll just go back to gentoo. Anyone know how to fix this?

 

[Christopher]

I can see three possible solutions:

1. Use ports instead of packages to build your own. This has the highest chance of working at the expense of taking a bit more time to install a package.

2. Upgrade to the latest 4-STABLE via the 'make world' uprade path. This will make pkg_add -r use packages-4-stable directory, which should be around for a while still.

3. You can specifiy a location for pkg_add -r to obtain packages with the enviroment variable PACKAGESITE. I haven't tested this but the below should work:

env PACKAGESITE=ftp://ftp10.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/i386/packages-4-stable/Latest/ pkg_add -r PACKAGENAME

Or you can set PACKAGESITE as an enviroment variable for your shell. For bourne shells:

export PACKAGESITE=ftp://ftp10.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/i386/packages-6-stable/Latest/

For c-shells:

setenv PACKAGESITE [url]ftp://ftp10.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/i386/packages-6-stable/Latest/[/url]

It might also be worthwhile to find out whats going on with your PCMCIA or CardBus slots under 5.x or higher so you could run the latest.