Daemon Dancing in the Dark

My First PBI

My first PBI is, of course, an Emacs one. I know when I first started using PC-BSD, I was shocked, shocked I tell you, to find out that there wasn't an Emacs PBI. That's the first thing I install when I move to a new OS is Emacs. So I set about getting one built.

For those of you unfamiliar with PBIs, they are the self-contained "packages" for PC-BSD - you try and put everything you can into a PBI, so to uninstall it you pretty much just delete the /Programs/application folder for it. It does mean some wasted space, but it is a pretty good solution in this day and age of big hard drives. There's still plenty of discussion going on in the PC-BSD Forums about exactly how much needs to be put in one, but it is still a pretty solid set of technologies.

So this one wasn't too bad. I carefully followed Dru Lavigne's detailed tutorial on how to make a PBI and it went pretty well. Emacs has an annoying dependency on some non-default fonts, so I had to play some font installing games in the PBI.SetupScript.sh, using the 'xset fp' command to tell the X server about it. And there was some other default paths that needed to be linked to, but it works well, I think.

Another very useful tool when building the PBI was the VMWare image you can download from the PC-BSD web site. By "playing" this in the free VMWare Player, you can test how it will work in a vanilla installation. It exposed a few problems with my script that would have gone unnoticed otherwise.

Unfortunately, while I took some notes, I did most of the work on it a month ago or so, and I can't find the notes, and I can't remember exactly what they were. So I'm going to try and make another one, with a little quicker turnaround. But it isn't too bad - give it a shot and you'll see!

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