Forum Feature requests

FreeBSD?

kmmv
I'm sure I could possibly get the static Linux builds to work fine, with a few port installs and some symbolic linking, but who wants to do that? :-)

Is there any plans to have a native FreeBSD binary version? FreeBSD powers a good number of servers, including my own. :-)
mikeday
A Prince 5.1 package for FreeBSD 4.8 is available for download here. Please note that this package does not use Fontconfig, as the library version is too old in FreeBSD 4.8. We will be releasing more Prince packages for FreeBSD in the future.
kmmv
I'm happy to report that even the alpha runs awesomely on FreeBSD 6.2.

You need the following ports installed:

  • emulators/linux_base-fc4 (linux_base-fc-4_9)

I'm skipping fontconfig. I'm an emacs guy and not big on GUIs, so simple absolute paths to fonts will work. I think the x11-fonts/linux-fontconfig port might do the job if the regular x11-fonts/fontconfig doesn't work.

The prince binary isn't ELF signed, or is improperly signed (might want to do this somewhere in your build toolchain, IIRC the GNU toolchain should do this automatically as of a few years ago). You just need to run
brandelf -t Linux prince
to correct the ELF signature.

Also, the install.sh didn't work properly. I just copied the lib folder from the .tar.gz to /usr/local/lib/prince/. You can copy over the other stuff too, if you want.

Instead of adding /usr/local/lib/prince/bin to the PATH, you can set up a symlink in /usr/local/bin/ to it.

Also note that if you're using ELF binaries for the first time, DNS will fail. You need to set up the defacto /compat/linux/etc/hosts.conf containing

order hosts, bind
multi on


I haven't run into any bugs yet (at least in the trial version)! I'm hoping the higher ups like the generated PDFs.
kmmv
Just one more note, the fontconfig port in X11-fonts/fontconfig works perfectly. Note that on FreeBSD, X11 tools are under /usr/X11R6/.

There's one caveat: it appears that Prince only checks /etc/fonts/ for font information, whilst your system will be storing it in /usr/X11R6/etc/fonts. A simple symlink keeps everyone happy.

You will need to run fc-cache in your fonts directory to ensure the system picks your fonts up. You can run fc-list to see if your fonts were installed (readability tip: fc-list isn't sorted by default, running "fc-list | sort" will sort it for you).