Check here for information relating to changes on our FreeBSD Guide.
April 23, 2009 - Added 3 lines to our /etc/rc.conf instructions in Post-Installation Configuration that as of xorg-7.4 are necessary if you want to be able to use your mouse while in X11. Also removed an outdated reference to ghostscript_gnu in the Setting up CUPS page. Lastly, I'll note that our FreeBSD Guide has a somewhat uncertain future at this point, as Dan's current hosting on the CSU Math server will expire at the end of 2009.
January 20, 2009 - Cleaned up the instructions for servicing Internet clients using network services, so that the page is easier to use with multiple different network services (it was a bit hidden before).
January 14, 2009 - Fortune smiles upon us. As of FreeBSD 7.1 it is now possible to use Flash9. I have also completely revamped the directions for installing a webserver, now using Joomla!.
July 26, 2008 - It was a pleasant surprise for me to find that Xarchiver has been added to ports. This is a nice improvement over the no longer developed Xarchive, so I have updated the applications page accordingly.
July 6, 2008 - It is with great joy to have another update after so long. I've added a mathematics applications page for those of us FreeBSD mathematicians out there. I've moved LaTex over from editors to this page, as well as adding the useful software packages PyX and inkscape. Hopefully these updates are useful!
June 22, 2008 - Modified the internet applications page. Both azureus and the official bittorrent clients were removed, and replaced with deluge. Seeing as azureus has changed ownership and become a rather dubious Vuze, it doesn't seem worth sticking with version 2 forever. Also, having had some difficulty making the official client work, deluge is a very nice alternative.
November 11, 2007 - Added a page on bluetooth and using a Nokia phone. Also fixed some errors in the linux openoffice page.
October 25, 2007 - Added evince to the graphics page, as a nice alternative to xpdf.
October 18, 2007 - I have updated the portupgrade page to note the use of the command 'startx -- -ignoreABI' in case there are problems after updating Xorg. Also, I have made a few miscellaneous fixes to the xupgrade page.
September 19, 2007 - At long last, there is an update. I've modified the custom keyboard page, in order to reflect changes due to Xorg 7.3.
July 23, 2007 - Added LaTeX to the editors page. Although it is a stretch to call LaTeX and editor, I feel this is the most appropriate section for it.
July 18, 2007 - Modified logging onto CSU's vpn to include instruction for doing so with the math server. Thanks to Zube for his help and patience to get this working.
June 11, 2007 - Fixed mirroring instructions to be relevant to the new server. There are also a few other miscellaneous fixes.
June 7, 2007 - Added portsnap as the recommended alternative to CVSup for updating the ports tree. Also added a fix for 0 byte downloads for firefox.
May 31, 2007 - Here is another very important update. The guide has moved! I have graduated from the electrical engineering program at CSU, and am entering graduate school for mathematics. The upshot of this, is I will continue to have free hosting for at least two more years, as I study mathematics. After that, we may have to look into a proper hosting solution for the guide. Please update all of your old bookmarks.
May 20, 2007 - One very big update today. Yesterday, May 19, xorg-7.2 was released into Ports. This is a major upgrade from xorg-6.9, so we have created a special page on Upgrading to xorg-7.2. Dan updated Setting up CUPS to note using ghostscript-gnu instead of the new default, ghostscript-gpl. This will prevent users with Asian fonts from suddenly having their world turn a little uglier after a portupgrade, and helped Dan with a weird foomatic problem on his computer. Dan also updated Installing Software through Packages with a very useful note about getting up-to-date packages. Lastly, we made minor changes to a number of pages due to the xorg upgrade and the move to {LOCALBASE} associated with it. Happy upgrading!
May 4, 2007 - Changed Gaim to Pidgin on the Internet Applications page to reflect the change in name of this venerable multi-protocol Instant Messaging app. The version of Pidgin currently in Ports is 2.0.0beta7, so those still using gaim-1.5 may want to wait for pidgin-2.0.0 final. (Once it's out, you should just be able to run portupgrade gaim).
April 30, 2007 - Updated the screenshot of Thunderbird on the Internet Applications page and added a new page: Thunderbird Tips and Add-ons.
April 13, 2007 - A few more minor updates today. First, I added a few notes on foomatic to the Setting up CUPS page, after using foomatic to get my brother Mark's Brother HL-5140 laser printer working with CUPS. I also changed the reference to linux_base-8 (Red Hat 8) to its replacement, linux_base-fc4 (Fedora Core 4), on the Matlab page, and divided that page into two sections: one for enabling linux binary compatibility and the other for installing Matlab itself once linux binary compatibility is enabled. I did this because the instructions on enabling linux binary compatibility are relevant not only to installing Matlab, but any other linux app as well, such as Flash9.
April 12, 2007 - A couple more updates related to Flash on FreeBSD. Most importantly, Firefox Plugins has been updated with instructions for getting Linux plugins to work with the FreeBSD-native version of Firefox, courtesy of an app called nspluginwrapper. You can now use Flash9 with Firefox. Secondly, I updated a few notes on the Internet Applications page, primarily dealing with Flash on both Firefox and Opera.
April 11, 2007 - A couple more minor updates today. First, I updated the install instructions for Azureus. I also updated the CUPS Setup page to note gimp-print changing its name to gutenprint. Finally, I updated Installing Java to reflect my experience running the diablo-jdk15 binary provided by The FreeBSD Foundation (i.e. I don't think it will be necessary for most users to compile jdk14 anymore).
March 23, 2007 - A few minor updates today. First, I changed the reference to fluxbox-devel on the Fluxbox Install page, as what used to be the "devel" version of Fluxbox has now been merged into the fluxbox Port. Current users of fluxbox can portupgrade normally and the name change will be automatically detected and applied. Also made two changes to the Applications - Tools page: removed the reference to gnome-commander no longer being actively developed. It is being actively developed again! The project homepage is here for those of you who want to check out the project and its development. Thank you to the developers for the link here under Building from source - Build on FreeBSD, and for continuing development on our favorite file manager. I also updated the install information for Gramps--this information is also relevant to anyone upgrading from version 2.0.x to 2.2.x. The same information can be found in my post on the gramps-bugs mailing list. Last but not least, I updated the copyright notice on the home page and attempted to clean up the code on the Upgrading Installed Packages page.
March 4, 2007 - Updated the Java page to add a note and instructions for installing jdk15 from the packages provided by The FreeBSD Foundation. I'm done with the bar exam now so perhaps I'll have more time for the guide.
February 3, 2007 - Two updates today. First, I added Opera to our Internet Applications page as an alternative web browser to Firefox. Second, I finally wrote instructions for Upgrading from 6.1 to 6.2. I actually did the upgrade on my own computer within a few days of 6.2's Release Announcement, so I apologize for the delay in getting instructions up. I (Kevin) have been studying for the February Bar Exam since last December and haven't found a whole lot of time for much else. (I'm not so sure that's going to change once I start practicing law. . .) At any rate it was a minor and painless upgrade from 6.1 to 6.2, so you (hopefully) shouldn't experience any show stoppers during your own upgrade.
January, 31, 2007 - Fixed the java page in order to reflect a change in the mount command, due to an upgraded version. Thanks to Michal Cizmazia for pointing this out to us.
January 15, 2007 - Made a few changes to Install Linux OpenOffice.org, namely I altered the rpm install command to use the Ports version of rpm rather than the Linux one. This change was necessary after the upgrade from linux_base-8 to linux_base-fc4. (That functionality was removed). I also added a note about using Linux Java with Linux OpenOffice.org in order to use features that require java (the Wizards).
January 6, 2007 - Added Installing Linux OpenOffice.org, which is really a resurrected version of our old OpenOffice on AMD64 page. I figured there was enough demand to justify posting instructions on using the Linux version of OpenOffice.
December 20, 2006 - Modified mpd to reflect the changes in version 0.12.
December 14, 2006 - Added a note about Compacting folders in Thunderbird to free up disk space by permanently removing deleted e-mails to our Internet Applications page.
November 15, 2006 - Updated the path to Firefox as the external link handler for Thunderbird in our
November 5, 2006 - Removed our Gnome Upgrade instructions as the information was no longer current. Users experiencing difficulties upgrading gnome components should check /usr/ports/UPDATING or visit The FreeBSD Gnome Project Home for information about upgrading gnome or its components. Also added a useful make flag to Installing Software through Ports: WANT_GNOME=no.
October 29, 2006 - Updated CUPS to 1.2.2 and split Printing into its own section. Also added some additional pages regarding printing, such as sharing printers to Windows clients and printing non-Latin characters. Also removed Flash as the information was no longer good.
September 3, 2006 - Added Fluxbox portupgrade, a very brief note about upgrading Fluxbox to fluxbox-devel-1.0rc2_2. The same information can also be found in /usr/ports/UPDATING.
July 7, 2006 - Updated 3 Reasons to use FreeBSD, attempting to give a more thoughtful comparison between FreeBSD and the competition.
July 6, 2006 - You may have noticed a new section on our Table of Contents: Package Management. We felt that the single page we had originally devoted to the topic was too unwieldy, and wanted to update and expand the information originally given. We now have pages on some useful package tools and techniques, and even added a few pages dealing with some of the most common errors encountered during a portupgrade. Check out this new section. We also removed our OpenOffice.org on AMD64 page, as OpenOffice.org-2.0.x now builds on AMD64, allowing AMD64 users to build this office suite natively rather than running a Linux package under Linux binary compatibility mode.
July 3, 2006 - Added a note to the 6.0 to 6.1 upgrade page that should reassure those of you still using 5.4 and wanting to upgrade directly to 6.1.
July 2, 2006 - Cleaned up input management. m17n-lib has been updated, and the quick hacks used before are no longer necessary.
June 28, 2006 - Cleaned up Samba and split it from mounting Samba shares from FreeBSD. Kevin also added using multiple NICS with Samba.
June 26, 2006 - There are many updates at this point in time. I made some minor usage fixes for bittorrent (the command names never stop changing...). I added a page on some mouse configurations for Xorg. If you have a Logitech MX500 or Logitech Marble Mouse be sure to check it out. Furthermore, I changed the fonts page in order to be more inclusive with the japanese fonts page. Finally, I generalized the instructions for japanese input to allow for input of nearly any foreign language.
June 7, 2006 - Updated the Gnome Upgrade page, as the technique for upgrading Gnome components has changed. These instructions should only be needed once, after which Gnome components should upgrade normally through portupgrade.
May 26, 2006 - I made a major update to the ftp page. I've included usage of noip in conjunction with proftpd. Hopefully it will be useful.
May 23, 2006 - I went and properly fixed the cups page, to reflect the changes in the daemon style.
May 19, 2006 - Kevin noted a problem with starting the cups scheduler, and the cups page has been updated to reflect this.
May 16, 2006 - Kevin wrote some instructions for upgrading to 6.1. I would've uploaded them awhile ago when Kevin did it, but I was in New York for awhile. I'm back now, so the page is up.
May 9, 2006 - Cleaned up the custom themes page, and got rid of a lot of unnecessary gnome components. I also modified apps a little bit, adding flpsed (a postscript editor), Xarchive (a gtk2 archiver), and TagTool (an id3 tag editor). Enjoy!
April 30, 2006 - Updated "Using Japanese in FreeBSD" to reflect the splitting of the uim Port into uim-anthy and uim-gtk, among others. Users portupgrading from uim-1.0.1 to the current version, uim-1.0.1_2 will need to install these two new Ports in order to re-enable Japanese input.
April 29, 2006 - You're in luck! Even more updates. This time, I updated gnome-commander to gnome-commander2 in the apps section. Also, I added a new page on custom themes. I hope you enjoy.
April 28, 2006 - I cleaned up a few things with apps. I replaced bmp with the newer audacious. I also added information on theming OpenOffice, which you should definately check out if you haven't themed OpenOffice already.
April 13, 2006 - Kevin has taken the liberty of adding computer emulators.
February 26, 2006 - I made some updates to vi commands.
February 25, 2006 - We are quite happy to add azureus to our applications section. If you haven't before, definately give it a try.
February 4, 2006 - Updated Using Japanese in FreeBSD to reflect changes in installation and usage following the release of uim-1.0.1
January 29, 2006 - Added instructions for installing OpenOffice.org on AMD64.
January 1, 2006 - Added Midnight Commander to applications. Also, we actually do have something against Linus and Steve.
December 26, 2005 - Added an emulators section to our apps section. Furthermore, we split up java and firefox plugins into two separate pages, in addition to adding to the firefox plugins page.
December 15, 2005 - Added gthumb to our apps section.
December 9, 2005 - Fixed some things on the CSU VPN page. The net admin CJ gave me information that allowed me to fix the mounting of /top. Thanks go out to him! Bittorrent has also been updated with slightly different command. I've reflected these changes in the apps page. Finally, the package management page has some updates.
December 5, 2005 - Added a few notes on using a scroll mouse in the Xorg section. I also added bittorrent to our applications section. Finally, I added instructions for installing MATLAB under linux binary compatibility. This seems to be a fairly common problem, so hopefully it will be useful. Finally I updated getting sound with instructions for enabling virtual channels.
November 29, 2005 - Updated the instructions for upgrading to 6.0. Also made some changes on the ftp page.
November 11, 2005 - FreeBSD 6.0 is here! The guide has been significantly reworked with the release of FreeBSD 6.0. The entire install section has been redone, as well as entirely new pages for applications. There are also many enhancements throughout the rest of the guide. Both vpn pages have additional information. I can't stress how major of an update this is. Of course with this many pages have been moved around, so likely any bookmarks to the guide will be broken now. Enjoy!
October 9, 2005 - We've added a few notes on upgrading Gnome components. This may be relevant even if you do not use Gnome as your Desktop Environment.
September 28, 2005 - Kevin has made some updates to logging onto a Microsoft Wireless VPN with a script for connecting, and instructions for mounting a network drive. These directions are for DU in specific, but I'm sure they can be applied elsewhere.
September 26, 2005 - I (Kevin) want to apologize for the Using Japanese in FreeBSD page. Prior to ja-uim-0.4.6_2, a different syntax was used in .xinitrc for enabling Japanese input via uim-anthy in both X and GTK apps. I caught the problem with regard to GTK apps, but through my neglect failed to update the syntax for uim-xim. I have updated the Using FreeBSD in Japanese page to include the correct syntax for both, so following these instructions you should be able to input Japanese in both GTK and non-GTK apps now. Again, I'm very sorry to anyone who followed the page and found that the information on it was out-of-date. In addition to this very important update, I added a small note about UTF-8, and otherwise reorganized things a little. I hope this is helpful to anyone who needs to input Japanese in FreeBSD!
September 25, 2005 - I've finally stopped being lazy and got some things I've wanted to do for awhile done. The first and most important is major updates to Setting up an FTP Server. The information wasn't nearly as good as it could've been in the past. I spent some time setting up limits, and the ftp is much nicer now. I definately recommend you check it out if you used it in the past, or want to make an anonymous ftp. I also added a small section on visual vim. It is pretty handy for copying and pasting while in vim. Finally, Kevin has added some additional information about unicode to our Japanese section.
September 24, 2005 - We've added a page on printing to a Windows printer from CUPS.
September 11, 2005 - A page on p5-XML-Parser has been added. Both Kevin and I have ran into this problem while upgrading ports, so it's very possible that there will be others with the same problem. This is a quick guide on how to fix it.
September 10, 2005 - Command line burning is here. This page really isn't for everyone, but it can be quite useful. With it comes updates to CD burning. Finally we've written a nice little page on backups. Backing up your data is a very essential thing to do, and you already know this if you've ever fallen victim to poor planning.
September 4, 2005 - Directions for logging onto CSU's VPN and mounting network drives from it have been added. Hopefully this information will be useful to a Linux or FreeBSD user at CSU. Also there is an update to mirroring instructions.
July 27, 2005 - Screen is here.
July 14, 2005 - I updated the xkeycaps page in order to map caps lock to control. It is much more useful this way (for screen especially). Expect sometime in the near future a section about screen.
July 6, 2005 - The section for Samba has been updated with information on logging in as a guest. We have also split the table of contents up a little bit more.
June 28, 2005 - The CUPS section has been updated with information on how to print to PDFs. Hopefully you will find it useful.
June 20, 2005 - Added a small note to fileroller for .rar archives.
June 13, 2005 - Minor cosmetic fixes on the Table of Contents.
June 10, 2005 - Added essential information for advanced tab completion in zsh (it's quite simple). Also added -h flag for df on commands page.
June 7, 2005 - Information for opening links from Thunderbird into Firefox has been added, and package management is here.
June 6, 2005 - Setting up an FTP Server has been added to the guide.
June 3, 2005 - A minor change here. Mirroring instructions have now gotten their own page. Hopefully in the coming days I will have a chance to write a page on setting up an FTP server.
May 30, 2005 - OK everyone, the moment you've all been waiting for (maybe not), upgrading to 5.4! It would've been up sooner (Kevin was ready a long time ago) but I've been a bit slow in testing the upgrade. Along with that I have replaced bash with zsh, which seems to be a bit nicer. That information is spread throughout a few pages, but most notably here. If you make the switch, be sure to take bash out of any old scripts you wrote, as that baffled me for a few minutes. Don't worry, there's still more. I've now added a section on TV-Out with nvidia cards for your movie watching enjoyment. On top of that I added scp, which allows the secure upload of a file via ssh. I even added two new applications (well, one old app).
May 23, 2005 - A nice and big update today. We recently went through a conversion of our brother's computer to FreeBSD 5.4. Also Kevin updated his laptop with a method that should hopefully soon make its way into the guide. Mirroring instructions are now up. Added to the CUPS page some information for servers with a static IP (which I would think would be all of them). The Pango page is gone because it didn't contain the best information. A replacement should come soon enough though. Added OpenOffice to the apps page, and a few other minor fixes here and there. Look out for more updates on the horizon as well, as soon as I can find the time for it.
May 18, 2005 - IE users can rejoice. I was browsing around on the forums of AGDInteractive and saw a nice tip about how IE will render things much better given the correct doctype. So I've added it to all of the pages. This is more my attempt to get this guide up to standards than to appease IE, but doing that in the process never hurt anybody.
May 13, 2005 - Cleaned a few things up in the code. We're working on getting some mirroring directions up soon. And my apologies for the Japanese page. I updated an old version when I CSSified the whole site, but now I've gotten the new version back online.
May 4, 2005 - Added updates section and contact information, along with a rewrite of this webpage's code. I took the time to learn CSS, and it is amazing. I will never go back to coding the way I used to. It is much cleaner now and mistakes have been corrected. But undoubtedly I've created more in the meantime. If you find something that is awry, just let me know.