On Tue, 17 Nov 1998, Eric Damien Berna wrote:

> >Can you use the installer to install a new package/binary after you have the
> >system up & running without destroying what is already there?  Eg I want to
> >install Apache.
> 
> You could use the installer to install new packages/binaries, but I
> wouldn't recommend it.  You should use the package system under NetBSD to
> install additional packages.

I strongly agree with the second sentance above. "packages" really need to
be installed by pkg_add. When you do that, they'll catch conflicts and
missing pre-requisites. Also, you can easily delete packages with
pkg_delete.

The main NetBSD distribution, base.tgz, comp.tgz, misc.tgz, etc.tgz,
man.tgz, etc.. are different in that they don't work with the pkg system,
and they work fine w/ the installer.

So use the installer for the latter (*) and pkg_add for the former.


Oh, the installer CAN deal with .gz'd files. You just have to use the
minishell to be able to do it. I've forgotten the exact command, but it's
there. Also, the kern.tgz kernel distribution is a gzip'd tar file so it
can be installed easily. :-)

Take care,

Bill

(*) Once you have base.tgz installed, I'd recomend cpin'ing the other
distribution sets and using tar under NetBSD to untar them. It's MUCH
faster!