freeBSD and xine

Hi there.

I recently started to migrate my client machine to freeBSD. i have nearly everything up and working, but there is one important question left:

some of the software that came with my installation cdroms is quite outdated, what i epecially need is xine.
i tried to install from the ports, but the makefile cannot find xine-0.99.tar.gz on the net (probably it is not around anymore since there is now much newer versions)
i downloaded the sources from the xine homepage, but they don´t compile.

now my question(s):
- how can i update my ports collection? (if this helps) is reinstalling from sysintall and supplying the freebsd ftp-server as source enough? (then there is no more recent version )
- or does anyone know how to get xine to work on freeBSD using other ways?

You can update your ports using CVSup. See the handbook for details here:
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.IS...book/cvsup.html

While you're at it, you might as well read how to upgrade your entire system, because the second chapter has some more descriptions of some cvsup config files and 4.7 is going to be released soon anyway:
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.IS...tting-edge.html

You say, i can update the whole system using CVSup? And will my configuration files still work? (unlike linux where i have to reconfig for each update again and again)

i only used cvs for source code so far, but hey, it has support for binary files, so why not ?

... i am reading now ... thank you for pointing me in the right direction

Hehe, actually the upgrade process in the link above tells you how to download the source code (not the binaries) for a new version and recompile it . FreeBSD also comes with a utility called mergemaster which allows you to quickly compare config files. That's one of the steps of the upgrade process detailed in the link above. Happy hackin'!

FreeBSD keeps its default configs in /etc/defaults, and you can create .conf files in /etc to override those defaults. For instance, there's nothing in my /etc/defaults/rc.conf to configure my Ethernet card, so in /etc/rc.conf, I have

ifconfig_ed0="DHCP"

If I understand the mechanism rightly, a kernel build will create new /etc/default/*.conf's, so the way to preserve your own settings is through the default override files, normally in /etc/*.conf

Regards

Yes, but there are other files for which there's no file in /etc/defaults e.g. /etc/ssh/sshd_config, /etc/mail/aliases, /etc/master.passwd etc. For these, you might need to manually check the differences and add the necessary lines by hand. mergemaster allows you to automate the process a bit.

after i could not make xine work at all, i tried "mplayer". compiled out of the box, works like a charm and it looks even better than xine (technically speaking)

now i am missing good nVidia drivers for X on freeBSD. i got some accelerated ones, but they lack support for GL .
from what i read i feel like i should get a different graphics card soon...