Hi,
I have been trying to get blender running on a ThinkPad T61p (with nouveau) for some time; it bulds OK, but when run gives a lot of errors suggesting that it cannot find its installation directories and bails out. I thought it was a missing environment variable and ktraced the real executable, which ran OK. It seems if it is invoked as a link - which is delivered by the package - it fails.
If one replaces the soft link with the trivial shell wrapper
#!/bin/sh
exec /usr/pkg/share/blender/blender "$@" &
It works OK (modulo having problems dealing with some bigger models, but that's another story).
I don't know if it is worth filing a pr, as I run it under -current.
Chavdar Ivanov