Packages, Installing

Installing from a pre-built package is faster than Installing_ports but the trade-off is that you don't get to configure the package the way that you would like to: you must take the package as the person who made the package compiled it.

It's a fairly straightfoward affair, you just need to use the pkg_add command, and if you don't have the .tbz package already on your system (which you likely won't,) use the -r switch to get the package remotely:

%pwd
/usr/home/dave
%su -m
Password:
%pwd
/usr/home/dave
%pkg_add -r xmotd
Fetching ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/i386/packages-5.3-release/Latest/xmotd.tbz... Done.
%

You can create a script to install common packages so that you get them all in one go, if you like.